1. GIS Introduction What is GIS?

3. Geographic Information Systems A database system in which the organizing principle is explicitly SPATIAL

4. What Can You Do With GIS? With GIS, you can analyze EVERY POSSIBLE MAP! With the right data, you can examine… –Land –Elevation –Population density –Distance to public restrooms –Noise levels Anything you can associate with a location! We use GIS to Model the World and the objects and phenomena in it.

5. GIS Maps Contain Layers GIS organizes, or ‘models’, the world as ‘layers’ of geographic objects or phenomena that are alike.

6. Layers Can Contain Features Features are geographic objects that can have shape and dimension. Can be ‘modeled’ as points, lines, or polygons. –Mine Locations –Streets –Census Blocks

7. Features Can Have Attributes In this example, each Census Block feature is associated with dozens of Demographic Attributes

8. Layers Can Contain Surfaces Surfaces are continuous geographic phenomena that cannot be described as discrete ‘Features’ and are generally modeled as ‘Raster’ data.

9. Surfaces Have Numeric Values

10. Spatial Imagery

11. Putting It All Together – GIS Analysis Because GIS Data is organized based upon location, unlike data can be ‘overlaid’ and analyzed based upon spatial relationships: Coincidence Proximity Containment Adjacency Intersection

12. GIS Analysis – For Example…