Specifications
right next door on the toolbar, the
Capture Point tool, is activated, and I
can create points anywhere I choose.
I create a point for each potential
building site I find and add a label to
each, as prompted by QGIS. I press
the Toggle Editing icon once again to
leave edit mode and return to normal
browse mode.
Thus far, QGIS has been useful in
giving me a broad perspective on natu-
ral and man-made features, as well as
land-use characteristics. This is much
more than what nearly every paper map
or Google Earth will give me. Still, QGIS
can’t do everything. Unfortunately, I
probably can’t acquire a shapefile with
current land-ownership status.
Therefore, I must utilize other resources,
such as the County Clerk, in order to
discover who owns which parcels.
Clearly my work has only just begun.
Closing Words in QGIS
The free and open-source QGIS turns
out to be an appropriate tool for pro-
jects involving land use, such as my
search for a site to restore a wetland
and build an eco-friendly housing devel-
opment. In this project, I was able to
locate the geospatial data I needed
from a free geospatial data repository,
load it into QGIS, tailor the data to my
liking and designate a plethora of
potential building sites. Besides land-use
projects, you also can delve into demo-
graphic data, satellite and aerial-photo
imagery, other natural and man-made
features and more. Although cramming
on GIS concepts and conventions was
required, working with QGIS and other
GIS applications, although a bit chal-
lenging at first, is extremely useful,
rewarding and fun.
I
James Gray is
Linux Journal
Products Editor and a graduate stu-
dent in environmental science and management at Michigan State
University. A Linux enthusiast since the mid-1990s, he currently
resides in Lansing, Michigan, with his wife and cats.
Figure 4. The Identify Features tool gives you detailed information on a particular feature. Be sure
you’ve chosen the right layer in the Legend.
Resources
QGIS Home Page:
www.qgis.org
QGIS Download Repositories:
download.qgis.org/
downloads.rhtml
OSGEO Home Page:
www.osgeo.org
Michigan Geographic Data Library:
www.mcgi.state.mi.us/mgdl
Most Linux distros come packed with documentation in
the /usr/share/doc directory, but rarely is there an easy
way to get an overview of what’s there. The following
script creates a master index of all the index.html files
in /usr/share/doc and outputs it as index.html in the user’s
home directory:
#!/bin/bash
input_dir=/usr/share/doc
output_file=~/index.html
cat >$output_file <<EOF
<html>
<head>
<title>$input_dir</title>
</head>
<body>
EOF
find $input_dir -iname 'index.html' | \
sed 's/[^ ]*/\<br\>\<a href="file:&"\>&\<\/a\>/' \
>> $output_file
cat >>$output_file <<EOF
</body>
</html>
EOF
—BILL ZIMMERLY
TECH TIP
Create a Master index.html of /usr/share/doc
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