Discussion If you are like me, and if so, I apologize and sympathize, then you probably have a few layers that you use all the time. These are likely part of your base layer set that you include in most of your maps. For me, these include parcels, roads, the city boundary, and aerial photos. …
Accessing data in QGIS A few years ago now, I wrote a post covering adding vector layers to QGIS. Much time, development, and improvement has passed since then. Since the usefulness of QGIS increases proportionally with your ability to actually add data to it, it is time to revisit this topic. QGIS has a toolbar …
This is the second in a series of posts that will look individually at a number of different database formats. I will discuss installing and basic configuration, as well as how to enable support of spatial data types in the database. This post will be on the open-source RDBMS, PostgreSQL. The first step is going …
The first step in putting together an open source suite of GIS software is to install some sort of storage medium for your spatial data. There are many options out there, ranging from the ESRI personal geodatabase, which uses a Microsoft Access database, to a fully relational database management system like PostGreSQL with PostGIS. Each …
The title of this post is in some ways rhetorical because to some people, this is their primary means of interaction with a computer. With the majority of people, though, I think a safe assumption is that the command line is something they have heard about, but don’t really understand where it is, or even, …
Update – April 2017 Many things have changed with QGIS over the last few years since this post was written. I thought it worth the time to revisit the topic and expand its scope. Please take a look at my new post: QGIS – Loading Data —————– One of the major differences between many COTS …
Finding open source GIS software is as simple as a Google Search. Of course, once you do that, sorting through the hundreds of returns to find something useful, is likely to be a challenge. If you look at the results for “open source GIS”, the first would seem likely. That site, however, hasn’t been updated …
This is the first post of the blog, so I suppose I should say what I think it is going to be about. Initially, I was going to begin writing a series of tutorials for using open source GIS products to mimic the functions of ESRI’s ArcGIS software suite. The more that I have started …
