GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS - G378
Spring 2007 CCSU
Dr. John E. Harmon
Rm. 312 DiLoreto
860.832.2789
harmonj@ccsu.edu
Office Hours: MW 11-12; 1-2; T 9-10 and before class

Geographic Information Systems [c] Prereq.: GEOG 130 or GEOG 256 or 276, or permission of instructor. Introduction to raster and vector geographic information systems, with a focus on application areas in natural resource management, urban and regional planning, and business.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

Understand and evaluate the various data models and structures used in the input, management, analysis and output of geographic data.
Review of hardware and software components of various geographic information systems.
Understand the basic functions of geographic data analysis
Develop hands-on experience with micro-computer based raster and vector systems.

Text: Price, Maribeth. 2006. Mastering ArcGIS. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2nd, ed. Each chapter has the following components: Mastering the Concepts, Mastering the Skills (Teaching Tutorial, Exercises, Skills Reference).

Each chapter in the text has four sections - a concept section, tutorial, exercise and skills reference. The author of the text has an interesting and effective way to use the text and here is how I would strongly suggest you use your time in this class:

Tuesday - read the Concepts section to get familiar with the principles and techniques and skim the skills reference section to find out what techniques will be learned. You may wish to view the videos at this time (included on your CD)
Wednesday - come to class prepared to discuss the concepts and answer the chapter review questions at the end of each chapter. We will begin Wednesday's section with a discussion of the previous week's exercise so it is important that you have completed it by then.
Thursday and Friday - work the tutorial. You will all have access to ArcGIS through the university's Citrix servers so this can either be done in the lab or at home if you have the resource.
Monday - come to lab to work through and print out the exercises for the chapter.

The university expects about two hours of work for each hour of in class time. That means that Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays you should set aside two hours to work on GIS.

Course Schedule

Date

Information Systems Component

Concepts

Reading

Tutorial and Lab

22-Jan

Management

Intro to GIS

File and folder structures, data set up

Data and connections

24-Jan

Management, Analysis

Definitions, project process, data models, data structures, metadata

8 Things to Know About ArcCatalog 9.2

viii - 37

38-56

31-Jan

Output

Basics of ArcMap

8 Things to Know About ArcMap 9.2

65-78

79-93

7-Feb

Management

Coordinate systems, map projections

109-124

125-138

14-Feb

Management

Working with Geodatabases

455-494

465-481

21-Feb

Input

Spatial editing

379-388

389-405

28-Feb

Management

More Editing Techniques

417-423

424-440,Exercise to come

5-Mar

Midterm Exam

7-Mar

Output, Analysis

Symbols, styles, layer files

142-154

155-173

14-Mar

Analysis, management

Tables, relational joins

179-192

193-205

28-Mar

Analysis

Queries

209-229

230-240

4-Apr

Analysis

Spatial joins

247-260

261-272

11-Apr

Analysis

Map Overlay

275-285

286-302

18-Apr

Output - Project Proposal Due

Presenting Data

309-320

321-333

25-Apr

Input/Management

Geocoding

349-361

362-373

2-May

Analysis

Analyzing Networks

489-501

502-512

9-May

Raster Analysis

523-538

539-556

14-May

Final Exam - Projects Due

Evaluation

Midterm Examination - 20%
Exercises - 25% Each lab will be returned with a letter grade. If there is a challenge question, to receive an A you will have had to successfully completed the challenge section. Late exercises are penalized a grade.
Final Examination - 25%
Final Project - 30% You will be getting a handout soon about this component of the course.

G378 Project Proposal Guidelines

Your final project is 30% of your grade and I want to know ahead of time what you will be doing. Here is what I want to see in a proposal (by April 18)

Project Goal – What do you wish to accomplish with this project? Good possibilities are suitability analyses, e.g. to find the best location to put something based on location relative to other layers. Some examples might be…

Where in South Dakota would the best place be to locate another hospital?
What ponds, lakes and rivers in Connecticut do not have state boat launches and where are the best five or six new locations for boat launches?
To develop an educational curriculum that links schools and hospitals within a watershed; this project will identify which schools should be linked with which hospitals in which watersheds based on watershed location and proximity.

Methodology – lay out the processing steps you will have to take to get to your desired answer. Be quite concrete so that when it comes to doing the activity you will just be implementing the steps. For the school example above, these might be some of the steps:

Through an attribute query, remove the (Historical) schools from the SD school layer so only active schools remain.
Do a simple, inside join between this new school layer and the watershed layer
Do a simple, inside join between the hospital layer and the watershed layer.
For each watershed, do a simple distance join between schools and hospitals within the watershed.
Assign the school to the closest hospital in the watershed.
Prepare a summary table by hospital and watershed with the number of schools assigned per hospital in the watershed.

Data – I suggest that you use either South Dakota data from the data sets that accompany your textbook or data for the state of Connecticut you will find at http://dep.state.ct.us/gis/Data/data.asp This is the DEP’s environmental data distribution site. Some, but not all, of this data is in the n:\dep folder. There is also a folder there N:\DEP\GDT which contains a lot of edited census data – schools, landmarks, etc… The last three characters before the file extenders are a little hard to figure out, e.g. ctxx0cyb.shp is the entire state for something called “cyb.” When you open it up it becomes apparent that cyb means “county boundaries.” “cvi” are the points representing the centers of the counties. “mcb” is the town/city boundary file. If you use any of this data along with DEP data make sure to project the GDT/Tele-Atlas data to CT State Plan NAD83 feet. However, if you wish to scour the web and find some data from a place that interests you, go ahead. But in this section specify what data layers you will use and what the source is.

For the project, turn in the proposal and an 11 x17 map sheet that explains what you did with pictures (maps) and text..

Working on Campus Other Than Rm. 312 DiLoreto

All machines in the Microlab have ArcGIS on them. You may have to map the N:\ drive (Geog_cmn share on Sundog on the aca_comp network) to have access to your data.

Working From Home

To get onto the Citrix server to run ArcGIS from your web browser

1. To install the client Citrix software, go to http://www.ccsu.edu/its/downloads/ and download/install the correct client.

2. Go to https://citrix.ccsu.edu

3. Log in with your user name, password and domain [ccsu_aca_comp]

4. Click on Geography Applications and then the ArcGIS component you want.
The reason they say NARCatalog, NARCMAP, etc.. is that the N drive is mapped to
those applications. This means you will have access to your data on that drive.
Access to local data, on your machine, is possible but actually much slower than
to the N drive. Keep your data there in your folders and it will work better.

It should connect to the server and launch the application

5. The N drive may not immediately appear in your catalog so click on the right yellow
arrow and enter N:\ in the box. . Your personal M drive is also there but students
have very little space allocation there and GIS data will quickly fill it up so I do
not recommend you use it for this course.