Scratching Surfaces

In several GIS training seminars I’ve used a collection of spatial data and exercises to demonstrate and practice some basic GIS operations using Quantum GIS. If you’d like to try out one of the popular open source GIS programs, download this zipped file. (100 MB, and compressed with 7zip). It contains a directory of documents, including the list of exercises, a directory of geospatial data, and several presentations.

Under the Docs directory are, in addition to the exercises, some manuals and other training material in pdf format. The Geodata directory contains spatial data from naturalearthdata.org, Open Street Map, the European Environment Agency, as well as raster tiles from NASA’s ASTER DEM and the Landsat programs.  Each of the exercises will require loading different data layers.  All data have been clipped to the area of Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina, and all are licensed so as to be freely usable.  Finally, under the Presentations directory are the slides used to explain various aspects of basic cartography and GIS theory.

If you find this learning material worthwhile, or have any comments for improvement, please let me know. I expect that I’ll continue polishing up the material, adding new presentations, and perhaps additional data sources. So check back.

*Update*

I’ve posted the tutorial in separate pieces so interested readers can have a preview before downloading the whole 100 MB zipe file. Here are the links:

• The  Exercises (160 KB)
• The  Presentations (12 MB)
• The  Whole package (100 MB)

Licensing details:

GIS Training with QGIS by Micha Silver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.