QGIS – Loading Data

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 strictly for adding data. It …

GIS Enabled Database Part 1 – MySQL

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 post in this series will …

QGIS – Vector Data Connection

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 applications and Open-source is in …

Where, but also why and how

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 using free, open-source software though, …