Book Image

Practical GIS

Book Image

Practical GIS

Overview of this book

The most commonly used GIS tools automate tasks that were historically done manually—compiling new maps by overlaying one on top of the other or physically cutting maps into pieces representing specific study areas, changing their projection, and getting meaningful results from the various layers by applying mathematical functions and operations. This book is an easy-to-follow guide to use the most matured open source GIS tools for these tasks. We’ll start by setting up the environment for the tools we use in the book. Then you will learn how to work with QGIS in order to generate useful spatial data. You will get to know the basics of queries, data management, and geoprocessing. After that, you will start to practice your knowledge on real-world examples. We will solve various types of geospatial analyses with various methods. We will start with basic GIS problems by imitating the work of an enthusiastic real estate agent, and continue with more advanced, but typical tasks by solving a decision problem. Finally, you will find out how to publish your data (and results) on the web. We will publish our data with QGIS Server and GeoServer, and create a basic web map with the API of the lightweight Leaflet web mapping library.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
14
Appendix

Importing layers into PostGIS


PostGIS has a very big benefit over other DBMSs--QGIS can communicate with it very well. The same applies for SQLite containers and the GeoPackage format, but PostGIS offers the best capabilities as it can be deployed as a server and accessed from multiple clients even concurrently. For accessing a PostGIS database from QGIS, first we need to connect to it. Remember the database we created in Chapter 1, Setting Up Your Environment? We will use the data provided there to define and save a connection in QGIS:

  1. Click on the Add PostGIS Layers button in the layers toolbar.
  2. Define a new connection by clicking on New.

 

 

  1. Fill out the required parameters we used to set up our database:
  1. By clicking on Test Connection, we can ask QGIS if the provided parameters are correct and sufficient. If it says so, we can save the connection by applying with the OK button.

Note

If you are using Windows, don't forget to provide the password you defined during installation.

Now that we have...