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

Preparing the workspace


First of all, we should choose a small area to work with. A populated town or city is an obvious choice for this task. The first obstacle is that there aren't any freely available settlement polygon data in the formats we are used to. To tackle this, we can download the required data directly from OpenStreetMap. OSM offers a read-only web database for accessing its data, which is available through the Overpass API. From Overpass, we can request data through regular web requests, and the server sends the matching features as a response (Appendix 1.5). In QGIS, we can install a plugin written directly for this--QuickOSM. Therefore, our first task is to install the QuickOSM plugin as follows:

  1. Open the plugin manager via Plugins | Manage and Install Plugins.
  2. Type QuickOSM in the search field.
  3. Click on Install plugin.

In QuickOSM, we can build Overpass requests in an interactive way. In Overpass, we can query features in a predefined area (for example, the extent of a layer...