[Qgis-user] creating a point, free basemaps and going past 180 degrees

[Carson Farmer]

Hi Mike,

 Three questions from someone newish to qgis:
>
>    1. how do you put point data on a map in qgis.  This seems to be the
>    simplest thing to do in most other gis systems but the most difficult in
>    qgis or have I completely missed something.  E.g. I have a file of lat long
>    coordinates or ordnance survey coordinates in an excel file and simply want
>    to plot them out, how do I do that?  I have actually done it but only via
>    another gis (then saving and replotting the resulting vector format file in
>    qgis) or via a .kml file again generated elsewhere.
>
> If you have the points in an excel file, you can simply save this as a csv,
and open this directly in QGIS. Have a look at the manual [1], which gives
you a nice walk-through of everything you need to do to get things going. In
particular, have a look at section 12.3 (Delimited Text Plugin).

>
>    1.
>    2. how to get hold of free basemap outline data e.g. countries of the
>    world.  I have tried very many different sources and still not found a nice
>    set of data that is relatively easy to use.
>
> In this case, you should be looking for a shapefile, and there are many
nice ones out there via Google, example:
http://www.bluemarblegeo.com/products/worldmapdata.php?op=download

>
>    1.
>    2. how to display and use maps that are not centred on the prime
>    meridian and go past 180 degrees e.g. maps of Russia?
>
> For this, you will want to find out the standard projections for Russian
data. Certainly a shapefile of the world will display data over Russia, but
you will need to find out what the relevant projections are before you do
any real work or mapping.


>
>    1.
>
>  This is for a project to plot records of species in Russia i.e. plot the
> location of a sighting, seems straightforward enough but actually turns out
> to be very difficult.
>
QGIS behaves fairly similarly to most other GIS packages, with perhaps a bit
more emphasis on 'plugins' (which is what you need to get csv files
working). Once you get the right data, and understand a bit about the
projection(s) that you need to be working in, things will go quite smoothly.
For a nice intro to GIS, and some excellent information on projections and
how to work with them in QGIS, have at "A Gentle GIS Introduction", also on
the manual page [1].

[1] **http://www.qgis.org/en/documentation/manuals.html

Regards,

Carson

-- 
Carson Farmer
National Centre for Geocomputation
John Hume Building,
National University of Ireland, Maynooth,
Maynooth,
Co. Kildare,
Ireland.
www.carsonfarmer.com
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