Can anybody here recommend a useful book on basic data structures
and algorithms for GIS?
While I'm not entirely sure of its content, the upcoming book
Pragmatic GIS might be helpful for you. I know he has more to say
about data types than I did and he also focuses on open source.
The content you described sounds like a type of book that is really
needed and would be very interesting. I know books like this have
been proposed to some publishers, but tend to not be very
marketable to the 'consumer' market and may never see the light of
day. You can probably find a vendor-specific book on each
individual topic you mentioned, but finding them compiled in a
single volume is likely more difficulty.
Thanks, Tyler. I have both Web Mapping Illustrated and Mapping Hacks
on my shelf -- both very good books. Apress has a title out --
Beginning MapServer: Open Source GIS Development -- but I haven't had
an opportunity to thumb through it yet. Pragmatic GIS will be out in
the second half of this year.
As far as commercial titles/software, Apress also has Pro Oracle
Spatial. And, of course, ESRI has a mountain of titles out.
My focus for the book is real world uses of GIS using nothing but
FOSS apps, libraries, and data. I try to cover the domain, well,
pragmatically. Let's download a shapefile of the US. Now let's
download a shapefile of Canada. Great, they both match up. Now let's
download a shapefile of some Colorado highways... D'oh, they don't
line up. Different projections. Let's learn what a projection is.
Let's learn how to reproject a shapefile. Now they all line up.
Great. Now let's stuff 'em into a database... Learn the domain
iteratively by tackling issues as they come up, JIT.
It's a populist GIS book, targeted at sharp programmers with little
or no GIS under their belt. So basic data structures -- yes.
Algorithms -- not so much. I try to hit the domain and the tools
equally -- learning by doing -- but routing algorithms and the like
are a bit deeper than the book goes. I'm trying to be a mile wide and
an inch deep, but at ~200 pages you can only linger on one topic for
so long.
I'm wrapping up a workshop I'll be doing at OSCON -- "Rolling Your
Own Google Maps". I'm also doing it at Euro OSCON, FOSS4G, and
various NFJS tour stops across the US and Canada. It'll be the
capstone of the book.
Below is a raw dump of the TOC thus far. You can also see some
preliminary stuff at http://www.mapmap.org .
Cheers,
Scott Davis
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----------
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Demystifying GIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Finding Free Data Sources and Applications . . . . . . . 3
1.3 Becoming a GIS Programmer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.4 What are you getting yourself into? . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2 Vector Data 9
2.1 Raw Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.2 Raster Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.3 Vector Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.4 Types of Vector Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.5 What data is available? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.6 Know your file formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.7 Anatomy of a Shapefile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.8 The Downloadable States of America . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.9 Downloading a viewer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.10 Styling Your Layers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.11 Viewing Multiple Basemap Layers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.12 More Data, Please . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.13 More International Data, Please . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.14 When Good Data Goes Bad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.15 Saving Your Map in ArcExplorer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.16 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3 Projections 35
3.1 The Round Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.2 Cartesian Planes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.3 What is a Projection? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
3.4 Changing Projections with GDAL . . . . . . . . . . . 44
3.5 What Does ’Round’ Really Mean, Anyway? . . . . . . . . 45
3.6 Coordinate Reference Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.7 Getting your data layers aligned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.8 Reprojection Utilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
4 Rasters 63
4.1 Getting started with Raster data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
4.2 Terraserver -USA: Another Source of Free Raster Imagery 68
4.3 Mosaics and Tessellation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
4.4 Temporal Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4.5 Panchromatic versus Multispectral . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
4.6 Scale and Resolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
4.7 Orthorectification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
4.8 Downloading Free Rasters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
4.9 Looking Ahead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
5 Installing a Spatial Database 103
5.1 Why Bother with a Spatial Database? . . . . . . . . . . . 103
5.2 Installing PostgreSQL and PostGIS . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
5.3 Adding Spatial Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
5.4 Inserting Spatial Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
5.5 Querying Spatial Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
5.6 Introspection of Spatial Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
5.7 Importing Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
5.8 Manipulating Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
5.9 Exporting Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
5.10 Indexing Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
5.11 Spatial Queries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
5.12 Visualizing Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
6 Serving GIS Data Over the Web 131
6.1 You Down With OGC? (Yeah, You Know Me). . . . . . . . . . . . . .
131
6.2 WFS
6.3 WMS
6.4 Installing GeoServer
6.5 Working with MapBuilder
7 Deconstructing Google Maps 135
7.1 Let's Build Our Own Google Maps from These Spare Parts. . . . . .
136
8 Appendix – Mac Installation 137
8.1 Installing GDAL/Proj/Geos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
8.2 Installing PostgreSQL and PostGIS . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
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