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

Creating a printable map


As we saw in the previous chapter, even the simple task of making a map can involve some geoprocessing. Now we will dive further into using basic geoalgorithms to fix some of the more obvious flaws of our map before exporting it. The most basic geoalgorithms in GIS are buffer, clip, intersection, difference, union, and merge. Some experts also consider dissolve a basic geoalgorithm, although it involves merge and multipart conversion with some criteria. Now we will use clipping to get features only in our study area. Clipping is similar to extraction used in the previous chapter, although it not only selects features within a mask but also clips the features to its boundary. It's like placing a cookie-cutter shaped as our study area in our case and only keeping the parts underneath.

Note

As we use more and more geoalgorithms, the instructions will be less informative and more concise. For the first few, we will discuss accessing and parameterizing the whole algorithm...