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


Congratulations! You just carried out your first raster analysis with MCE. It is valuable to have the ability to use raster data effectively, and to create suitability analysis on demand. The best thing is that we were able to do the analysis with free and open source data. In this chapter, we learned how to effectively use and analyze raster data. We created a suitability map for an imaginary cause of building a warehouse based on a set of criteria. We were able to delimit suitable areas, and calculate statistics on them to further help making a good decision. Finally, we automated the map making process by creating an atlas with every important piece of information on every suitable site.

In the next chapter, we will leave the realm of desktop GIS, and dwell on web mapping. We will learn the basics of the server side of web mapping systems. First, we will serve our data with QGIS for instant and easy publication, then start to learn GeoServer, which is a far more capable software...