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

Visualizing PostGIS layers in QGIS


Great work! You just created a spatial database filled with every kind of data. Now let's visualize them in QGIS. First, get rid of the opened layers, and read the layers from PostGIS by dragging and dropping them from the database manager to the canvas. Visualizing PostGIS layers in QGIS is as easy as that. We don't even have to worry about changes in the database. By changing the scale of the map or clicking on the Refresh button in the main toolbar, QGIS will automatically incorporate every change occurred since the last refresh:

Note

Be careful with visualizing PostGIS raster layers, especially with large tile numbers. QGIS (GDAL) will eventually make too many calls and PostgreSQL will refuse serving additional data with the error message of too many clients opened.

Basic PostGIS queries

Now that we have access to our layers in PostGIS, let's try some queries. Visualizing a whole layer from a database can involve a lot of traffic as databases are often...