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

Chapter 12. Styling Your Data in GeoServer

In the previous chapter, we covered the basics of sharing content over the web. We discussed how the web works, and how we can send spatial data over it. Then, we set up QGIS Server to see how spatial data are rendered as regular images and visualized in a client. Then we went on and configured GeoServer to have a reliable spatial server in our service, even capable of tiling up rendered images, and not only providing, but also caching those tiles.

In this chapter, we will learn about styling vector and raster data in GeoServer. We will cover the basic symbolizers we can use, and the syntax of the style language used by GeoServer--SLD (Styled Layer Descriptor). After you understand how SLD works, we'll go on and study the more convenient GeoServer CSS, which is a concise, CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)-based language available in GeoServer through an extension.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Vector and raster symbology in GeoServer...