Revision for the last five lectures

)Mid-term exam material's(

INTRODUCTION TO
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
SYSTEMS (GIS)
Lecture 1

DEFINITION OF GIS

A GIS is a system of computer software,

hardware, and data for capturing, managing,
analyzing, and displaying all forms of
geographically referenced information.

COMPONENTS OF A GIS

Data
Buildings

People

Streets
Air Photos

GIS

Software

Hardware

Procedures
After: R. Rose/fas.harvard.edu

BENEFITS OF GIS
GIS answers the following
Location: Where is it?...
Condition :what is it?
Trends: What has changed since?...
Patterns: What spatial patterns exist?
Modeling: What if?

DATA REPRESENTATION
Raster

Vector

Real World

RASTER DATA

Regular grid of cells:

Each cell represents an area on the land surface.
Value assigned to cell represents attribute:

Land cover.
Elevation.
Satellite mages.

VECTOR DATA
Vector Data uses Points and their
(X,Y) coordinates to represent
spatial features.
Type of geographic feature as vectors:
Point :trees, stations, wells, houses
Line : streets, rivers, pipes
Polygon : lakes, States, countries

GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION OF
GEOGRAPHIC FEATURES
Location
Attributes
Spatial Relationships

LOCATION
Projection of round earth
onto flat surface

Scale of Data

ATTRIBUTES
Non-spatial data associated with objects:
Land cover (Area, Type, Coordinate, Land owner)
Stream (Length, Flow rate, Name(
Stored in tables that are linked with objects:
Polygon Attribute Table, Arc Attribute Table, Point
Attribute Table.

SPATIAL THINKING
Geometric characteristics of individual objects
Length, area, perimeter, shape.
Spatial relationships between 2 or more objects
Distance, direction, topology.

 Overlays
combination of two or more data sets to create new data
set.
A
B
A+B

Proximity
finding areas that are near features.

Spatial Data
and Geo-referencing
2Lecture

RASTER LIMITATIONS
Raster grid must cover the entire study area.
Files can grow to enormous sizes for large study areas
with small cell sizes (resolutions(
Attributes are limited and linking to tabular data is not
possible.

VECTOR
ADVANTAGES
Each vector feature has an accompanying record in the
database.
In its simplest form, one feature has one record in the
attribute table.
We can store multiple vector objects in one database
record.

Data Collection Techniques

of raster and vectors
Raster
Primary

Secondary

Vector

remote sensing
GPS
images (Satellites measurements
Images)
Digital aerial
photographs

Survey
measurements

Scanned maps

Topographic
surveys

DEMs (Digital
Counter lines
Elevation models)

AERIAL PHOTOS

Satellite
Imagery
Scanned Maps

WHAT IS THE GLOBAL POSITIONING

? SYSTEM
Consists of a system of 24 satellites.
Position in a receiver is determined by precise
calculations from:
the satellite signals,
the known positions of the satellites
Position in the three dimesions (latitude, longitude and
elevation) requires that at least 4 satellites are above the
horizon.

Map
ITS A SCALED REPRESENTATION OF THE EARTHS
SURFACE SHOWN ON A PLANE SURFACE.
It shows natural and/or artificial features.

However, its only accurate at time of aerial photo or

field revision.

MAP ELEMENTS
1) Legend.
2) Projections and Coordinates.
3) North arrow.
4) Scale
5) Title.

1) LEGEND.

Conventional Symbols
Water features
Structures
Boundaries
Road & Rail
Land features

2) PROJECTIONS AND COORDINATES.

of transforming earths spherical surface
to a flat map while maintaining spatial relationships.
process

The

(X,Y) position on that flat map.

Flat Map

Curved Earth

MAP SCALES

size of an object on a map compared to the actual

object on the ground

map distance
map scale
ground distance

GEO-REFERENCING
If we have layers with:
Different scales.

Different coordinates.
Different Projections.

Map layout, Symbolizing and

labeling features
3) Lecture

MAP LAYOUT
Cartography
Science / art / technique of map production.
Uses a set of defined graphical elements to
communicate a message.

USES OF MAPS

1) To record and store spatial data.

2) To analyze locational distributions and spatial patterns.
3) To present information and communicate findings
)often to help facilitate decision-making(

SYMBOLIZATION
What are map symbols?
Maps give us a lot of information and there is not much room
for labels.
So we use symbols to save space and make the map
easier to read.
Symbols may be simple drawings, letters, shortened words
or coloured shapes or areas.

BALANCING MAP ELEMENTS

Concept
Each map element has its own importance.
The cartographer must organize them according to
priority.

A general rule:
The most important elements should be on the top left.
The least important elements should be on the bottom
right.

Most important
information
Visual Center

Least important
information

Raster classifications
4) Lecture

THE RASTER DATA MODEL

X, Y
location

X, Y
location

Column
s
Rows

Raster data file

N rows by M columns

Georeferenced to earths
surface

Fixed length and width of cell in surface units.

RASTER RESOLUTION
number of cells in data set is determined by cell size
decreasing cell size increases the number of cells
also increases size (storage space required) by data set
smaller cell sizes are preferred; increase is spatial detail and
spatial resolution (accuracy(

THE MIXED PIXEL PROBLEM

Water dominates

Winner takes all

Edges separate

W W

W G

W W

W W

W W

W G

RASTER TYPES
Represents any data source that uses a grid structure to
store geographic information.
Two raster categories:
A) Thematic data rasters: values attributed to each cell
represent some measured quantity or classification of
phenomena such as elevation, precipitation, population, etc.
B) Image rasters:values of cells represent reflected or
emitted light energy as in satellite or aerial photography, or
a scanned photograph.

RASTER ORIGINS
1) Remote sensing.
2) Interpolation.

1) REMOTE SENSING.
Remote sensing (RS) is the art, science, and technology of
observing an object, scene, or phenomenon by instrumentbased techniques without a direct physical contact.
The interest for this Module is, however, Earth observation
from airborne or spaceborne platforms.
RS is applied in many fields, including architecture,
archaeology, medicine, industrial quality control, robotics,
extraterrestrial mapping, etc.

IMAGE CLASSIFICATIONS IN
REMOTE SENSING
Supervised classification : develops the rules for
assigning reflectance measurements to classes using a
"training area", based on input from the user, then applies
the rules automatically to the remaining image.
Unsupervised classification: is a method which examines
a large number of unknown pixels and divides into a
number of classed based on natural groupings present in
the image values.

SUPERVISED CLASSIFICATION

Satellite Imagery

Derived Area Map

UNSUPERVISED CLASSIFICATION

2) INTERPOLATING

WHY INTERPOLATION?
Spatial data have variability in the coordinate and a value
or values (X,Y,Z)

Spatial variability is observed by limited number of

stations.
A continuous field v = v(x,y,z,t) is to be estimated from
discrete values vi = v(xi,yi,zi,ti)
Transfer of point information from one region to others.

3) GLOBAL
INTERPOLATION
Uses all known sample points to estimate a value at an
unsampled location.
Sample
data

INTERPOLATION:
Estimating the attribute values of locations that are within
the range of available data using known data values.
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GLOBAL METHOD
It is the most usefull and needed method.
predicting a z elevation value [dependent variable] with
x and y location values [ndependent variables]
There are different geostatisticial methods:
1) Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW(
2) Splines.
3) Kriging.

The easiest one is (IDW(

Queries and reasoning

Measurements of geographic
data, length, area, etc.
Lecture 5

OBJECTIVES OF QUERYING IN GIS

Tools for examining your data:
Identify, Find, Measure, map tips.
Promoting and displaying selected records.
Working with selection tools:
Why do you need a selection.

Available selection tools.

Selection methods and layers.
Spatial selection.

Attribute selection.

WHAT IS QUERYING?
A GIS is composed of a database:
Spatial attributes linked to their features.
Most GIS have a huge list of records.
1)Very time consuming to find manually the needed
information.
2)Need an automated procedure to extract from the
database the records useful for a task.

Records

GIS DATABASE

Relevant
records

Query

Query results

QUERYING STRATEGY
Using fields in a database to find records satisfying
at set ofconditions.
Conditions are defined by operators applied to fields.
Logical operation.

Operators either return True of False.

Records that are true are selected )flagged(
Age

Age

23

:Operator

23

47

30Age <

47

19

19

35

35

QUERYING USING SPATIAL

ATTRIBUTES
.1Querying Based on Proximity.
.2Querying Based on Membership.
.3Querying Based on Intersection.