In certain occasions we need to calculate the distances from a series of elements to another one that we will call ‘origin’. The Euclidean distance geoprocess available in gvSIG Desktop allows us to do it automatically. And, from there, we could know for example which elements are farther from a certain distance from the origin, which is the closest element to the origin or the farthest one.

The Euclidean, or Euclidean distance, is the “ordinary” distance between two points of a Euclidean space, that is, the length of the straight line between those two points.

The operation, as shown in the video of this post, is extremely simple. Basically we have to indicate the source layer and the layer with the elements whose distance we want to calculate from the origin.