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 13. Creating a Web Map

In the previous chapter, we learned how to style spatial data in GeoServer. We started with a simple symbology for raw vector and raster data and proceeded to more advanced and also more aesthetic cartographic representations. We ended with a group layer resembling the composition we created with QGIS's print composer. We also looked at some other independent vector and raster layers, styled and ready for use.

Now we will use our styled data and create some client-side interactive maps to showcase our results. We will use JavaScript to create a web map that can not only use our already styled vector and raster data as image layers using WMS, but can also use raw vector data with WFS. We will cover how to make our maps more interactive by styling vector data on the client side and enabling our users to query them without sending additional requests to the server.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • The basic JavaScript syntax
  • Using the Leaflet API...