Despite the fact that some of the advanced GIS software suggest, we only need to know which buttons to press in order to get instant results, GIS is much more than that. We need to understand the basic concepts and the inner workings of a GIS in order to know the kind of analyses we can perform on our data. We must be able to come up with specific workflows, models which get us the most meaningful results. We also need to understand the reference frame of GIS, how our data behaves in such an environment, and how to interpret those results. In this chapter, we will learn about GIS data models by browsing our data in QGIS, and getting acquainted with its GUI.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Graphical User Interface of QGIS
- Opening spatial data in QGIS
- GIS data models
