Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

QGIS is a desktop geographic information system that facilitates data viewing, editing, and analysis. Paired with the most efficient scripting language—Python, we can write effective scripts that extend the core functionality of QGIS. Based on version QGIS 2.18, this book will teach you how to write Python code that works with spatial data to automate geoprocessing tasks in QGIS. It will cover topics such as querying and editing vector data and using raster data. You will also learn to create, edit, and optimize a vector layer for faster queries, reproject a vector layer, reduce the number of vertices in a vector layer without losing critical data, and convert a raster to a vector. Following this, you will work through recipes that will help you compose static maps, create heavily customized maps, and add specialized labels and annotations. As well as this, we’ll also share a few tips and tricks based on different aspects of QGIS.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
QGIS Python Programming Cookbook - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Visualizing data on a globe


Ever since the release of Google Earth, spinning globe applications are a useful and popular method of geographical exploration. QGIS has an experimental plugin called QGIS Globe that is similar to Google Earth; however, it is extremely unstable. In this recipe, we'll display a layer in Google Earth.

Getting ready

You will need to use the QGIS plugin manager to install the mmqgis plugin.

Make sure you have Google Earth installed from https://www.google.com/earth/.

You will also need the following dataset from a previous recipe. It is a zipped directory called ufo, which you should uncompress to your qgis_data directory:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/ufo.zip

How to do it...

We will load our layer and set up the attribute we want to use for the Google Earth KML output as descriptors. We'll use the mmqgis plugin to output our layer to KML. Finally, we'll use a cross-platform technique to open the file, which will trigger it to open in Google Earth...