Book Image

QGIS 2 Cookbook

By : Alex Mandel, Víctor Olaya Ferrero, Anita Graser, Alexander Bruy
Book Image

QGIS 2 Cookbook

By: Alex Mandel, Víctor Olaya Ferrero, Anita Graser, Alexander Bruy

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 (19 chapters)
QGIS 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using GDAL


The QuickMapsServices and OpenLayers plugins, as described in the Loading BaseMaps with the QuickMapServices plugin and Loading BaseMaps with the OpenLayers plugin recipes in Chapter 4, Data Exploration, are awesome as they put a reference layer in your map session. The one downside, however, is that it is a hassle to add new layers. So, if you come across or build your own Tile service and want to use it in QGIS, this recipe will let you use almost any Tile service.

Getting ready

You will need a web browser, text editor, and the URL of a web-based XYZ (sometimes called TMS) service—one that allows you to make requests without an API key. We're going to use the maps at http://www.opencyclemap.org/.

Viewing the JavaScript source (a good tool for this is Firebug, or other web-developer tools for the browser), we can view the source URLs for the tiles.

How to do it…

  1. Open http://www.opencyclemap.org/ in a web browser.

  2. Now, figure out the URL for the tiles by looking at the source code...