In the past, professional spatial analysis in the business sector was equivalent to buying an ArcGIS license, storing the data in some kind of Esri database, and publishing results with the ArcGIS Server. These trends seem to be changing in the favor of open source software. As FOSS (free and open source software) products are gaining more and more power due to the hard work of the enthusiastic open source GIS community, they pique the curiosity of the business sector at a growing rate. With the increasing number of FOSS GIS experts and consulting companies, both training and documentation--the two determining factors that open source GIS products traditionally lacked--are becoming more available.
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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
Practical GIS
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 (15 chapters)
Preface
Free Chapter
Setting Up Your Environment
Accessing GIS Data With QGIS
Using Vector Data Effectively
Creating Digital Maps
Exporting Your Data
Feeding a PostGIS Database
A PostGIS Overview
Spatial Analysis in QGIS
Spatial Analysis on Steroids - Using PostGIS
A Typical GIS Problem
Showcasing Your Data
Styling Your Data in GeoServer
Creating a Web Map
Appendix
