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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned how to improve the speed of our vector analysis by orders of magnitude. We simply used one of the state-of-the-art tools for quick vector analysis--PostGIS. We also learned more about vector analysis, some of their pitfalls, and how to get more out of our spatial database. We carried out a spatial analysis, which would have been cumbersome in other desktop GIS software, to gain valuable extra information from our data. Of course, PostGIS and PostgreSQL have capabilities far beyond the scope of this chapter; therefore, if you are planning to work with spatial relational databases, it is definitely worth digging in deeper, and reading additional sources focused on PostGIS.

In the next chapter, we will focus on raster analysis, and learn about the most essential raster tools. We will create a decision problem where we have to choose the best site based on some criteria. Finally, we will not only solve that problem, but additionally, use some statistical methods...