Basic GIS Concepts

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. What is a GIS? What is SPATIAL Analysis? What is a Theme? Points, Lines and Polygons Overlaying Data Conducting the Query (Set/subset basics and, or, not etc)

What is a GIS?
A GIS or Geographic Information System is a system designed for storing, analyzing, and displaying spatial data. Today, GIS manipulations are primarily accomplished through the use of computers, software and computer users.*

What is SPATIAL analysis?

Spatial analysis is simply analysis that involves spatial data and gives you information that is spatial in nature. For example, if you were querying your US data layer for high human population density, the areas of high density would be located primarily on the West and East Coasts of the United States. That answer is spatial in nature.

What is a Theme?
Each of our towns has many features such as roads, schools, shopping centers, rivers, lakes, forests, farms, to name just a few. A GIS stores these features as separate data layers. In Arcview, each data layer is called a theme.

Points, Lines and Polygons:

Themes (data layers) are stored in the computer as 3 different types: points, lines or polygons. Point theme: cities, wells, schools, airports Line theme: roads, streams Polygon theme: vegetation, land ownership The significance of this is fairly obvious in these examples, but is important for more complicated analysis. You can compute the length of a line theme but not

the area. You can compute the area or perimeter of a polygon theme. For the computer the theme type determines how it stores the data internally.

Overlaying Data:
Each of the themes in a GIS can be overlayed upon one another. Think of an overhead transparency projection system where each transparency shows a different data type. One shows roads, another streams, and yet another land use types. You can put all of these together, or look at just two data types.* Also, you could do a simple analysis by creating a 1 mile buffer around the roads theme. By defining a one mile strip around the roads theme, one could find out what types of land uses exist within that one mile strippotentially very useful information for planners and developers. A GIS such as Arcview GIS works in a similar way as described above only operations and analysis are all done through the use of a computer and digital data.

Conducting the Query:

A query is a question that you form into an equation to ask a question of the particular theme you are interested in. In Arcview you use the query builder to help you form your query. For example, in the theme land cover, you might want to see where all the Aspen vegetation is in your county. For the query: Where are all the Aspen forests? You would build the query: ([vegetation type] = Aspen) Thus you have defined a subset of data from the original set. Note that parentheses must be around your query. Also note that names such as Aspen must be quoted. This is only true for names; numbers do not need to be quoted. Suppose you wanted to query to ask the question: Where is the Aspen and Douglas Fir vegetation in my county? You would need to use an operator to connect two statements such as and, or, not. Your query in Arcview would look like: ([vegetation type] = Aspen) and ([vegetation type] = Douglas Fir)

* GIS in K-12 Education, April 1995, Arcview White Paper Series, Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. Redlands, CA.