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

Accessing raster data


The first data type that we will use is raster data. It might be the most familiar to you, as it resembles traditional images. First of all, let's open QGIS. In the browser panel, we can immediately see our downloaded data if we navigate to our working directory. We can easily distinguish vector data from raster data by their icons. Raster layers have a dedicated icon of a 3x3 pixels image, while vector layers have an icon of a concave polygon:

Note

Don't have a browser panel? You can toggle panels from the View menu's Panels option. If it is displayed, you can dock it anywhere by dragging it out from its current place and placing it in another part of the GUI.

We can drag and drop most of the data from the browser panel or, alternatively, use the Add Raster Layer button from the Add layer toolbar and browse the layer. The browser panel is more convenient for easily recognizable layers as it only lists the files we can open and hides auxiliary files with every kind of...