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Table Of Contents

Practical GIS

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Practical GIS

Buy this Book

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.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Setting Up Your Environment

Understanding GIS

Setting up the tools

Collecting some data

Summary

Accessing GIS Data With QGIS

Accessing raster data

Accessing vector data

Understanding map scales

Summary

Using Vector Data Effectively

Using the attribute table

Selecting features in QGIS

Modifying the attribute table

Understanding data providers

Summary

Creating Digital Maps

Styling our data

Understanding projections

Preparing a map

Creating a map

Summary

Exporting Your Data

Creating a printable map

Sharing raw data

Summary

Feeding a PostGIS Database

A brief overview of databases

Importing layers into PostGIS

Visualizing PostGIS layers in QGIS

Summary

A PostGIS Overview

Customizing the database

Optimizing queries

Backing up our data

Summary

Spatial Analysis in QGIS

Preparing the workspace

Vector analysis

Building your models

Using digital elevation models

Summary

Spatial Analysis on Steroids - Using PostGIS

Delimiting quiet houses

Matching the rest of the criteria

Querying rasters

Summary

A Typical GIS Problem

Outlining the problem

Raster analysis

Using fuzzy techniques in GIS

Calculating statistics

Creating an atlas

Summary

Showcasing Your Data

Spatial data on the web

Using QGIS for publishing

Using GeoServer

Summary

Styling Your Data in GeoServer

Managing styles

Writing SLD styles

Using CSS in GeoServer

Summary

Creating a Web Map

Understanding the client side of the Web

Creating web maps with Leaflet

Working with Leaflet plugins

Summary

Appendix

Vector analysis

We can get a partial result by only considering our vector layers, and running some vector analysis tools on them. There are different methods for different type of analysis; however, we can group the most frequently used methods into the following four groups:

Overlay analysis: Analyzing features according to their spatial relationships to other features. Common use cases are spatial queries and spatial joins.
Proximity analysis: Analyzing the relationship of features based on some distances. The heart of this type in a traditional desktop GIS software is the buffer tool, while the rest of the work is basically overlay analysis.
Neighborhood analysis: Analyzing (more often, statistically) neighbouring features of some input features. When we need to find the closest features to some input features, it is called a k-NN (k nearest neighbor) query.
Network analysis...