Spatial Analysis

GISOwl includes a no-code spatial analysis toolkit accessible from the Layers panel. Run common geospatial operations directly in the browser.

Available Operations

Buffer

Create a buffer zone around features at a specified distance. Choose between round, flat, or square end caps. Output is a new polygon layer.

Intersect

Find the geometric intersection of two layers. The output contains only the areas where both layers overlap, with attributes merged from both.

Union

Merge two layers into a single layer, combining all geometries and dissolving shared boundaries.

Clip

Cut one layer using the boundary of another. Features outside the clip boundary are removed.

Difference

Subtract one layer's geometry from another. Useful for finding areas in layer A that are not covered by layer B.

Nearest Neighbor

For each feature in layer A, find the closest feature in layer B. Output includes the distance and the matched feature's attributes.

Dissolve

Merge features within a single layer based on a shared attribute value. For example, dissolve census tracts into counties by the county_name field.

Centroid

Generate point features at the geometric center of each polygon.

Running an Analysis

  1. Right-click a layer and select Spatial Analysis.
  2. Choose the operation.
  3. Select the second layer (if applicable) and configure parameters.
  4. Click Run. A new layer is created with the results.

Performance

Spatial analysis runs server-side on GISOwl's PostGIS backend. Operations on large datasets (100k+ features) may take a few seconds. Progress is shown in the status bar.

Next Steps