Using Open Source Tools to Create an Enterprise GIS

Welcome to the course - watch the following material to learn what we are going to cover in this class - and don't forget to download the support material below, so you can work alongside me.

In this lecture, you will learn what an Enterprise GIS is, the stages in enterprise GIS implementation , and the example scenario used in this course.

This quiz is for you to evaluate how well you are understanding the material. Don't worry, you won't be graded on it. It really is to help you determine if you are ready to move forward.

In this lecture you will learn how to download and install PostGRES, PostGIS, and Quantum GIS (QGIS). While many courses have the software waiting for the students to use in order to simplify things, we will actually show you how to install PostGRES, PostGIS, QGIS, and other extensions to make the enterprise GIS work.

This quiz will allow you to review your knowledge of the installation of PostGRES, PostGIS, and QGIS.

In this lecture you will actually load a variety of data (attribute and spatial) into PostGRES and PostGIS. Particular attention will be paid to open source tools available for data loading, and also how to manage different coordinate systems in the database. Unlike many courses that already have the data waiting for you, this course will make sure that you know how to load the data yourself!

This quiz will test your knowledge about the data loading lecture.

If you've ever used a multi-user enterprise system, you may have wondered how some users have access to certain data but not other data. In this lecture, you will learn how to create specific working GROUPS, and assign those groups to individual layers. You will create groups that have full control over data, view only capabilities, and limited editing capabilities. In the next lecture, students will create individual login roles for specific users who will inherit the permissions granted to the groups.

In this lecture, you will learn how to manage the database users through creating specialized roles and permissions. Particular emphasis is made on giving users the proper permissions for viewing, editing, and creating data. Here you will create a multi-user system with different users having different levels of data access. At the end of this lecture you will have confidence that you can assign different permissions to different users.

This quiz will review some of the basic information you gained while adding groups and login rules for your database.

One of the things that makes an enterprise system so powerful is that you can create constraints that protect your data from erroneous data entry. Many GIS implementations have a middle-ware tier to handle data integrity. But, it is often easy to bypass these securities. In a real enterprise system, all the logic and security is handled by the database itself - in other words, you can't circumvent the security. In this lecture, you will learn how to add constraints to the data to ensure that data is properly protected. And unlike many of your GIS counterparts, you can state that the data is protected no matter what system a third party uses to access the data.

This quiz will test your knowledge of adding constraints

In this lecture, you will learn how to create VIEWS to control what a user might see in the database. Rather than having a user directly link to a layer, a VIEW will allow the database manager to create a visualization of the data that an end user can see. In this lecture, we will focus on creating a specialized view from a simple attribute query, a more complex query that spans multiple tables, and a spatial query that re-imagines the original layer to take on the characteristics of the spatial query.

This quiz will test your knowledge about creating views

In this lecture, you will learn how to load raster data into PostGRES using the raster2pgsql.exe command. Although using the command line is a little more cumbersome than a GUI, learning to use this command is well worth it, as the GDAL library allows you to load virtually any kind of data source.

In this lecture, you will learn how to use QGIS to perform analysis on data stored in PostGRES. Also, the lecture will demonstrate how to also perform GIS analysis using Manifold GIS. In this case, you will learn how QGIS (or Manifold GIS, or any other GIS product) doesn't care where the data comes from - it will just use it. And, having structured the data in an enterprise GIS you gain the advantage of having the data better managed in PostGRES.

Have you ever tried editing data in a GIS when someone else was trying to edit it? Most often, you can't, as the data becomes locked once a user checks it out for edting. In this session, you will actually perform multi-user, simultaneous editing of the GIS data in PostGRES using QGIS. Students with access to Manifold will also be shown how to edit the data with other software products.

So, unlike most of your GIS counterparts, you'll have built a system that can handle multiple users simultaneously editing the data!

In this lecture, you will learn how to create triggers, that will fire off in response to some action the user might take. Specifically, you will create a trigger that automatically updates a value in the parcels table with the watershed it is contained in. Also, your trigger is going to make sure that the new geometry you create actually falls inside a watershed boundary. This is a really powerful way to control your data quality and also automatically perform analytical tasks in response to a data editing activity you might perform.