Using Open Source GIS

This is one of the three books identified by the Education and Curriculum Committee that should be written. The other books are Developing Geospatial Solutions using Open Source and Developing Web Mapping Solutions Using Open Source.

Approach for writing this book

Using the application categories from http://freegis.org we'll gather problems or use cases, maybe divide them into subproblems, and describe how they can be solved using the free tools.

Editing geospatial data

• Problem: Editing shapefile
  • Subproblem: Add or delete a feature
  • A solution:
  • Subproblem: Change the location of the vertices
  • A solution:
  • Subproblem: Edit attribute data
  • A solution:
  • Subproblem: Alter the schema (add or delete fields)
  • A solution:

Geocomputation

• Problem: Compute the total area of polygons in a dataset