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 7. A PostGIS Overview

In the previous chapter, we got introduced to the various types of spatial databases. We created and filled a PostGIS database with vector and raster layers. After that, we learned about the PostgreSQL SQL syntax, and executed some basic queries to get results which were previously only possible with geoalgorithms in QGIS. With our current knowledge, we would be able to integrate PostGIS into our workflow, and create some spatial analysis and visualization tasks using QGIS only as a thin client. That means, PostGIS does the hard lifting, while we only visualize the results in QGIS. However, we are yet to explain how to create good spatial databases with the intent of creating a distributed working environment. In this chapter, we will learn about some of PostgreSQL's and PostGIS's features, which can aid us in creating a stable and well-organized spatial database.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter :

  • PostgreSQL features
  • PostGIS structure
  • Optimizing...