Book Image

QGIS 2 Cookbook

By : Mandel, Olaya Ferrero, Anita Graser
Book Image

QGIS 2 Cookbook

By: Mandel, Olaya Ferrero, Anita Graser

Overview of this book

QGIS is a user-friendly, cross-platform desktop geographic information system used to make maps and analyze spatial data. QGIS allows users to understand, question, interpret, and visualize spatial data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps. This book is a collection of simple to advanced techniques that are needed in everyday geospatial work, and shows how to accomplish them with QGIS. You will begin by understanding the different types of data management techniques, as well as how data exploration works. You will then learn how to perform classic vector and raster analysis with QGIS, apart from creating time-based visualizations. Finally, you will learn how to create interactive and visually appealing maps with custom cartography. By the end of this book, you will have all the necessary knowledge to handle spatial data management, exploration, and visualization tasks in QGIS.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Using Geopackages

Geopackage is a new open standard for geospatial data exchange from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an industry standards organization. It is intended to allow users to bundle multiple layers of various types into a single file that can easily be passed to others. This recipe demonstrates how to utilize this new data format and what to expect in the future.

Getting ready

For this recipe, you will need a Geopackage file, often the extension is .gpkg. There should be a naturalearthsample.gpkg file in the provided sample data.

You'll also need GDAL 1.11 or newer; if you have QGIS 2.6 or newer, this probably came with a new enough GDAL. If you don't have a new enough GDAL, consider upgrading QGIS, which usually bundles newer versions.

Tip

Want to check what versions you have? In QGIS, open Help | About | About.

How to do it…

  1. Open the Add Vector dialog.
  2. Click on the Browse button and select the naturalearthsample.gpkg file:
    How to do it…
  3. Now, back in the main dialog, click...