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

Using fuzzy techniques in GIS


Now that we have our final constraint layer, which can be used as a simple mask, we can proceed and create our factors. First, we can remove every intermediary layer we worked with, as our factors use different vector layers as input:

  1. Open the geonames, rivers, waterbodies, and roads vector layers.
  2. Filter the geonames layer to only show the seats of the administrative regions. The correct expression is "featurecod" LIKE 'PPLA%' or "featurecode" LIKE 'PPLA%' depending on which version we use.

 

  1. Filter the roads layer to only show motorways and highways. Such a filter can be applied with the expression "fclass" LIKE 'motorway%' OR "fclass" LIKE 'primary%'.
  2. Get the mean point of the seats of the filtered settlements by using the QGIS geoalgorithms | Vector analysis tools | Mean coordinate(s) tool. The input should be the filtered geonames layer, while the rest of the options can be left with their default values.
  3. Save every result (that is, filtered roads, mean_coordinates...