Course Overview

[MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to Fundamentals of GIS. In this lesson I'm going to give you a brief
introduction to GIS but not an overly technical one. We're going to focus, instead, on why GIS is really
exciting and why you might want to learn how to work with it. In the next lesson will give you a more
concrete understanding of GIS, but for now I just want you to get excited. This lecture is safe to skip if
you're in a rush, but if you stick around to the end I hope I can make you as excited about GIS as I am. To
introduce GIS I'd like to tell you how I came across it. When I was in school I was sort of an amateur
software developer. It wasn't my focus, but something I did for fun. And I liked to solve problems by
automating them with software. For a class I read this paper, the details of which are lost to me now, but
it involves studying migratory birds. And they discussed breaking up the world into a large grid of cells to
track movement of them, or something like that. And here's where I got this brilliant idea. What if I could
make software that made that easy? What if you could have a simple piece of software that let you paint
on your computer, sort of like Microsoft Paint, but you'd have these layers and then you could run
mathematical functions comparing or combining the layers? Some software that let you understand data
in a geographic context. That would be so cool. I was thinking small at this point, but still thought I had an
idea that would be useful at least to a few thousand people or something. I mentioned my roommate,
and he said, that sounds a lot like GIS. In a sort of matter of fact way like, yeah, that's a good idea and
they already have it. Looking it up, I discovered just how important this software already was in shaping
the modern world and how many disciplines already rely on it. So much of what we interact with matters
in part because of where it is or what's around it. And people had been building these types of tools for
decades. That's what I want to show you right now. The many ways to understand the world and your
own work in it with GIS. Let's start with that ubiquitous technology in many of your pockets, the
smartphone. I'd argue that the GPS chip in those phones is nearly as critical to their usefulness as the
persistent connection to the Internet. We're always using our devices to understand what's around us. To
find a nearby place to eat, or a place to buy something we need. Or we might be touring and trying to find
things to do, and then we need to find out how to get there, so we'll use the mapping feature on the
phone. These are all core components of GIS. Where these places are, how you're location relates to them,
and then how to get there on a complex transportation network.

2:38

An extension of this technology that takes it out of the smartphone navigation realm and into the desktop
GIS realm, is to combine this information about our road networks with population information. And use
it to figure out where to put resources, such as warehouses or storefronts for your business, so that
they're accessible by customers. GIS can also help us solve other types of routing problems. A classic one
in my line of work is, where does the water go? We know water flows downhill, but we need data to tell
us where downhill is on a landscape scale. Once we have that information for an area, we can figure out
where rivers form by figuring out the common locations that water runoff occurs. This can help in
everything from determining flood risk and choosing town locations, to figuring out how much water is
available for an area.

3:22

A utility might take that information and combine it with current population information and estimates
for growth in a town and use it for capacity planning of their infrastructure. They can then use GIS software
to determine what kinds of pipes they need and where they should run in order to most efficiently deliver
their water and enable proper maintenance.

3:40

Other people who run that same town can use GIS to help make sure it's the kind of town people want to
live in by planning out the communities and making sure that growth is directed to the areas that the
community wants it to be in. This is typically called land use planning and it's a common GIS use case.
Sometimes it's a town's urban planners who use it to map out the zones in a town and where industry
and commercial and residential development should occur. And other times it's crowdsourced and the
planners invite the citizens in to use specialized GIS software to say how they want to see their town grow.

4:13

At the edges of these towns are farmers who are using GIS and remote sensing to determine how to
maximize the yield of their crops. By monitoring soil conditions and capturing aerial images that can help
assess plant health, they can determine where they may need to increase watering or scale it back. And
whether or not they may need to amend their soil.

4:31

Meanwhile, a migratory bird uses that farm as a temporary stop in its migration. A non-profit volunteer
takes notes of what birds are in the area, and enters it into a spacial database. The non-profit then builds
maps that show the range of the species, and these go in books and online publications to help birders
and members of the general public identify and connect with the birds. In the county or state government,
an economist may be interested in what crops the farmer is are choosing to grow in order to accurately
estimate economic output across regions. They can use this to determine what kinds of jobs and training
are needed in a given area, understand how the value of that land is changing when production changes,
predict tax revenue, and direct funds for infrastructure. That data's also passed off to members of the
emergency management agencies. They keep track of incidents of floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and
earthquakes, and this information can help them estimate and prevent human and economic losses from
these types of disasters. Even with all these stories, we're still only scratching the surface of what you can
do with GIS. But what really excites me is that it seems like so much of the world now understands the
importance of location. There's an old saying that you never really understand something until you
understand how it relates to something you already know. This is the crux of spacial information,
referencing our data to other locations in the real world. To almost any important fact we can add context
by knowing where something occurred. Spacial information opens up a whole world of possible new
questions or interesting answers when added to an organization's other data, and that's something that's
rapidly occurring right now. We're already witnessing a generation of people who grow up with location
information in their pockets. There are many directions that information can take you. One direction is
what you learn in this class, which is to analyze location data. I do think that it will become so important
to be able to analyze location data that the next generation will learn the basics of GIS the way that my
generation learned how to use spreadsheets. Again, I think all this is really exciting and I hope it illustrates
that GIS isn't just one thing. It's a general set of technologies and a way to think about data that open up
exciting, new possibilities. I'm even more excited about GIS now than I was when I thought I came up with
idea many years ago. It's getting more interesting and more powerful every year. I'm glad that you're here
to learn how, so let's go get started.
 Course Mechanics
[MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to Fundamentals of GIS. In this lesson I'm going to give you a
brief introduction to GIS but not an overly technical one. We're going to focus, instead, on why GIS is
really exciting and why you might want to learn how to work with it. In the next lesson will give you a
more concrete understanding of GIS, but for now I just want you to get excited. This lecture is safe to
skip if you're in a rush, but if you stick around to the end I hope I can make you as excited about GIS
as I am. To introduce GIS I'd like to tell you how I came across it. When I was in school I was sort of
an amateur software developer. It wasn't my focus, but something I did for fun. And I liked to solve
problems by automating them with software. For a class I read this paper, the details of which are lost
to me now, but it involves studying migratory birds. And they discussed breaking up the world into a
large grid of cells to track movement of them, or something like that. And here's where I got this brilliant
idea. What if I could make software that made that easy? What if you could have a simple piece of
software that let you paint on your computer, sort of like Microsoft Paint, but you'd have these layers
and then you could run mathematical functions comparing or combining the layers? Some software
that let you understand data in a geographic context. That would be so cool. I was thinking small at
this point, but still thought I had an idea that would be useful at least to a few thousand people or
something. I mentioned my roommate, and he said, that sounds a lot like GIS. In a sort of matter of
fact way like, yeah, that's a good idea and they already have it. Looking it up, I discovered just how
important this software already was in shaping the modern world and how many disciplines already
rely on it. So much of what we interact with matters in part because of where it is or what's around it.
And people had been building these types of tools for decades. That's what I want to show you right
now. The many ways to understand the world and your own work in it with GIS. Let's start with that
ubiquitous technology in many of your pockets, the smartphone. I'd argue that the GPS chip in those
phones is nearly as critical to their usefulness as the persistent connection to the Internet. We're
always using our devices to understand what's around us. To find a nearby place to eat, or a place to
buy something we need. Or we might be touring and trying to find things to do, and then we need to
find out how to get there, so we'll use the mapping feature on the phone. These are all core
components of GIS. Where these places are, how you're location relates to them, and then how to get
there on a complex transportation network.
2:38

An extension of this technology that takes it out of the smartphone navigation realm and into the
desktop GIS realm, is to combine this information about our road networks with population information.
And use it to figure out where to put resources, such as warehouses or storefronts for your business,
so that they're accessible by customers. GIS can also help us solve other types of routing problems.
A classic one in my line of work is, where does the water go? We know water flows downhill, but we
need data to tell us where downhill is on a landscape scale. Once we have that information for an
area, we can figure out where rivers form by figuring out the common locations that water runoff occurs.
This can help in everything from determining flood risk and choosing town locations, to figuring out
how much water is available for an area.
3:22

A utility might take that information and combine it with current population information and estimates
for growth in a town and use it for capacity planning of their infrastructure. They can then use GIS
software to determine what kinds of pipes they need and where they should run in order to most
efficiently deliver their water and enable proper maintenance.
3:40
Other people who run that same town can use GIS to help make sure it's the kind of town people want
to live in by planning out the communities and making sure that growth is directed to the areas that
the community wants it to be in. This is typically called land use planning and it's a common GIS use
case. Sometimes it's a town's urban planners who use it to map out the zones in a town and where
industry and commercial and residential development should occur. And other times it's crowdsourced
and the planners invite the citizens in to use specialized GIS software to say how they want to see
their town grow.

4:13
At the edges of these towns are farmers who are using GIS and remote sensing to determine how to
maximize the yield of their crops. By monitoring soil conditions and capturing aerial images that can
help assess plant health, they can determine where they may need to increase watering or scale it
back. And whether or not they may need to amend their soil.
4:31
Meanwhile, a migratory bird uses that farm as a temporary stop in its migration. A non-profit volunteer
takes notes of what birds are in the area, and enters it into a spacial database. The non-profit then
builds maps that show the range of the species, and these go in books and online publications to help
birders and members of the general public identify and connect with the birds. In the county or state
government, an economist may be interested in what crops the farmer is are choosing to grow in order
to accurately estimate economic output across regions. They can use this to determine what kinds of
jobs and training are needed in a given area, understand how the value of that land is changing when
production changes, predict tax revenue, and direct funds for infrastructure. That data's also passed
off to members of the emergency management agencies. They keep track of incidents of floods,
tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, and this information can help them estimate and prevent
human and economic losses from these types of disasters. Even with all these stories, we're still only
scratching the surface of what you can do with GIS. But what really excites me is that it seems like so
much of the world now understands the importance of location. There's an old saying that you never
really understand something until you understand how it relates to something you already know. This
is the crux of spacial information, referencing our data to other locations in the real world. To almost
any important fact we can add context by knowing where something occurred. Spacial information
opens up a whole world of possible new questions or interesting answers when added to an
organization's other data, and that's something that's rapidly occurring right now. We're already
witnessing a generation of people who grow up with location information in their pockets. There are
many directions that information can take you. One direction is what you learn in this class, which is
to analyze location data. I do think that it will become so important to be able to analyze location data
that the next generation will learn the basics of GIS the way that my generation learned how to use
spreadsheets. Again, I think all this is really exciting and I hope it illustrates that GIS isn't just one
thing. It's a general set of technologies and a way to think about data that open up exciting, new
possibilities. I'm even more excited about GIS now than I was when I thought I came up with idea
many years ago. It's getting more interesting and more powerful every year. I'm glad that you're here
to learn how, so let's go get started.

Why GIS is Awesome

[MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to Fundamentals of GIS. In this lesson I'm going to give you a brief
introduction to GIS but not an overly technical one. We're going to focus, instead, on why GIS is really
exciting and why you might want to learn how to work with it. In the next lesson will give you a more
concrete understanding of GIS, but for now I just want you to get excited. This lecture is safe to skip if
you're in a rush, but if you stick around to the end I hope I can make you as excited about GIS as I am. To
introduce GIS I'd like to tell you how I came across it. When I was in school I was sort of an amateur
software developer. It wasn't my focus, but something I did for fun. And I liked to solve problems by
automating them with software. For a class I read this paper, the details of which are lost to me now, but
it involves studying migratory birds. And they discussed breaking up the world into a large grid of cells to
track movement of them, or something like that. And here's where I got this brilliant idea. What if I could
make software that made that easy? What if you could have a simple piece of software that let you paint
on your computer, sort of like Microsoft Paint, but you'd have these layers and then you could run
mathematical functions comparing or combining the layers? Some software that let you understand data
in a geographic context. That would be so cool. I was thinking small at this point, but still thought I had an
idea that would be useful at least to a few thousand people or something. I mentioned my roommate,
and he said, that sounds a lot like GIS. In a sort of matter of fact way like, yeah, that's a good idea and
they already have it. Looking it up, I discovered just how important this software already was in shaping
the modern world and how many disciplines already rely on it. So much of what we interact with matters
in part because of where it is or what's around it. And people had been building these types of tools for
decades. That's what I want to show you right now. The many ways to understand the world and your
own work in it with GIS. Let's start with that ubiquitous technology in many of your pockets, the
smartphone. I'd argue that the GPS chip in those phones is nearly as critical to their usefulness as the
persistent connection to the Internet. We're always using our devices to understand what's around us. To
find a nearby place to eat, or a place to buy something we need. Or we might be touring and trying to find
things to do, and then we need to find out how to get there, so we'll use the mapping feature on the
phone. These are all core components of GIS. Where these places are, how you're location relates to them,
and then how to get there on a complex transportation network.

2:38

An extension of this technology that takes it out of the smartphone navigation realm and into the desktop
GIS realm, is to combine this information about our road networks with population information. And use
it to figure out where to put resources, such as warehouses or storefronts for your business, so that
they're accessible by customers. GIS can also help us solve other types of routing problems. A classic one
in my line of work is, where does the water go? We know water flows downhill, but we need data to tell
us where downhill is on a landscape scale. Once we have that information for an area, we can figure out
where rivers form by figuring out the common locations that water runoff occurs. This can help in
everything from determining flood risk and choosing town locations, to figuring out how much water is
available for an area.

3:22

A utility might take that information and combine it with current population information and estimates
for growth in a town and use it for capacity planning of their infrastructure. They can then use GIS software
to determine what kinds of pipes they need and where they should run in order to most efficiently deliver
their water and enable proper maintenance.

3:40

Other people who run that same town can use GIS to help make sure it's the kind of town people want to
live in by planning out the communities and making sure that growth is directed to the areas that the
community wants it to be in. This is typically called land use planning and it's a common GIS use case.
Sometimes it's a town's urban planners who use it to map out the zones in a town and where industry
and commercial and residential development should occur. And other times it's crowdsourced and the
planners invite the citizens in to use specialized GIS software to say how they want to see their town grow.

4:13

At the edges of these towns are farmers who are using GIS and remote sensing to determine how to
maximize the yield of their crops. By monitoring soil conditions and capturing aerial images that can help
assess plant health, they can determine where they may need to increase watering or scale it back. And
whether or not they may need to amend their soil.

4:31

Meanwhile, a migratory bird uses that farm as a temporary stop in its migration. A non-profit volunteer
takes notes of what birds are in the area, and enters it into a spacial database. The non-profit then builds
maps that show the range of the species, and these go in books and online publications to help birders
and members of the general public identify and connect with the birds. In the county or state government,
an economist may be interested in what crops the farmer is are choosing to grow in order to accurately
estimate economic output across regions. They can use this to determine what kinds of jobs and training
are needed in a given area, understand how the value of that land is changing when production changes,
predict tax revenue, and direct funds for infrastructure. That data's also passed off to members of the
emergency management agencies. They keep track of incidents of floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and
earthquakes, and this information can help them estimate and prevent human and economic losses from
these types of disasters. Even with all these stories, we're still only scratching the surface of what you can
do with GIS. But what really excites me is that it seems like so much of the world now understands the
importance of location. There's an old saying that you never really understand something until you
understand how it relates to something you already know. This is the crux of spacial information,
referencing our data to other locations in the real world. To almost any important fact we can add context
by knowing where something occurred. Spacial information opens up a whole world of possible new
questions or interesting answers when added to an organization's other data, and that's something that's
rapidly occurring right now. We're already witnessing a generation of people who grow up with location
information in their pockets. There are many directions that information can take you. One direction is
what you learn in this class, which is to analyze location data. I do think that it will become so important
to be able to analyze location data that the next generation will learn the basics of GIS the way that my
generation learned how to use spreadsheets. Again, I think all this is really exciting and I hope it illustrates
that GIS isn't just one thing. It's a general set of technologies and a way to think about data that open up
exciting, new possibilities. I'm even more excited about GIS now than I was when I thought I came up with
idea many years ago. It's getting more interesting and more powerful every year. I'm glad that you're here
to learn how, so let's go get started.

What is Gis?
[MUSIC] Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to talk about what a GIS is.

0:12
You may have many different ideas of what a GIS is. So, in this lesson, we're going to define GIS, and talk
about potential components of GIS. And, then we'll go into questions you can ask and answer. And then
the types of ways that a GIS can do that for you. And then go into just a little bit of history of where GIS
came from and where we're at now. So in a more formal sense esri's definition of GIS is, An integrated
collection of computer software and data used to view and manage information about geographic places,
analyze spatial relationships, and model spatial processes. A GIS provides framework for gathering and
organizing spatial data and related information so that it can be displayed and analyzed. I think that
second sentence is less dense and also a really good summary on its own. And esri is the maker of ArcGIS,
so they know a fair amount about GIS.

1:06

Still somewhat formal but a little more condensed, a different definition of GIS from Burrow 1986 is, A set
of tools for collecting, storing, retrieving at will, transforming and displaying spacial data from the real
world for a particular set of purposes. These are still really broad if you're noticing that trend. It could be
a whole lot of things. A more practical definition of GIS would be, Software and data that enable us to ask
and answer questions involving where something is and how that location relates to other things. So I'd
say if it can analyze spatial relationships or if it can display location information to you, it's probably a GIS.
That includes Yelp, Google Maps, Google Earth, your GPS in your car, anything that involves spacial
information is probably a GIS.

1:52

At the same time, there is no reference implementation for GIS. It is not a programming language that has
a specific set of rules by which it needs to abide by. It is a really generic concept and that's part of the
power.

2:05

It's anything. You can come up with anything related to location and relate it to data and software and it's
probably a GIS at that point.

2:14

Components of GIS, potentially, are design, work flow and organization, how your data moves through it
and how you analyze it, the specifications of your data or of your software, the technology involved. So
that would be from the computing hardware to the software to what the user interacts with. The
algorithms involved, which ties back to the workflow and organization. And then the research that goes
into it. This stuff is built on years and years of research on how computers work on how location
information is gathered and processed and used. So, there are all sorts of things you should be thinking
about in a GIS. And that's where you come in is without humans to integrate all these pieces, there's no
system. GIS is geographic information systems, and the system is whatever we make of it. So when you
put these components together, you make a GIS.

3:09

So what types of questions can we ask of a GIS? And when I talk about asking questions of a GIS, I mean
that you have data that you want to learn something about and so you can present it to your GIS and put
it through an algorithm or a work flow in order to get a new result out, and that's your answer to your
question. So what exists at a certain location would be the most basic question you could ask in a GIS.
Just, what's there? Where are certain conditions satisfied? What has changed in a place over time? What
spatial patterns exist? What if this condition occurred at this place? And that's where you get into future
prediction and hypothesis testing. And then, where do variables interact? There are tons more questions
you can ask but notice that location and where and spatial is a really common pattern here. That's because
it's a GIS, right?

4:01

So to answer those questions we're asking of the GIS, we need some information on the world. That
information can fall broadly speaking into two buckets. There's the bucket of how it looks. That's form or
pattern information. And there's the bucket of how it works. That's process information. How it looks isn't
just a visual thing. It's any information you can observe about the world using instruments or vision or
that you would put down on a data sheet. How it works is different. It's what you construct, what you
understand about the world based upon your observations. That knowledge of how it works is oftentimes
more valuable than the information on what it looks like because we can use that information to predict
what's going to happen. So once we get into processing this data that we're collecting, there are all kinds
of ways that we can do it. The most basic of these is just viewing the data and you're going to do that this
week. So when you add data to ArcGIS it displays in a viewer and you can customize how it looks and start
to understand the data just from looking at it. That's really basic but often really critical because you can
start to see errors and problems in your data right off the bat.

5:10

Other ways of interacting with a GIS, other tasks you might have for using a GIS are to create new data,
or edit existing data because it needs to have new information attached to it, or you have corrections
because of new information you've gathered. You may need to transform the data. And that's a really
broad concept. But those work flows or algorithms, the geo processing tools, that transformation is really
where you do the bulk of your asking and answering of those questions. And then when you're done with
a lot of that you're going to want to display your data to others. And that's still a big component of it
because if you learn the answer but you can't effectively convey it to others, that's a problem. So, that's
a large segment of ArcGIS, is just making those maps and exporting those data tables for others to see.
And then, finally is that you might want to integrate your systems with others on the internet in order to
provide data services to people to use. So that they can pull that data into their GIS systems for use when
they need it too. And that's another way of sharing the data, in addition to maps and data tables directly.

6:15

Some basic applications in GIS that fall right onto that, the end results effectively that we might see, is
we're going to have cartography, we're going to make maps. We may have databases that we publish for
others to use. We have topology information, which is just spatial relationships. We have long term
monitoring that we can gather in the form of a database. Then we can do change detection. And say
what's going on in this place over time?

6:42

These are just a few. There are lots of other applications of GIS. But just to give you a sense for some
things you can create. The workflow that you might go through in running an analysis in GIS at a basic
level is pretty simple. You're going to determine the place you're interested in, and then ask that question
about it, and wonder. That's where you create your hypothesis. And then you analyze your data to make
a map, or another product, like a data table. And that might require multiple iterations. You're going to
explore the patterns that appear when you generate that data. And then you may decide that you need
to modify your question or enhance the data in order to recreate that analysis in a better form in the
future, and refine your question and get a better answer. And then repeat as necessary. Ask new questions
and publish new results.

7:34

Broadly speaking there are just a couple types of GIS but you can really construct these in a lot of different
ways. But we talk about desktop GIS, that's what you're going to be using in this course. It's interactive,
it's open-ended. You load data and you analyze it and you create results however you like. It's completely
dependent upon the user to produce results. The server-side GIS, or server GIS is usually large, non-
interactive servers online somewhere or in your organization where tools can be published or maps can
be published and read back down. And then you can run data through those tools but you do that from
your desktop GIS. The server does the processing for you but delivers the results back to you when it's
done for use in desktop GIS. A more consumer-oriented approach would be decision support tools or web
GIS. Web GIS is stuff you've all used, Google Earth, Google Maps. ArcGIS Online is a web GIS that's starting
to blue the lines of desktop GIS and web GIS. But they're much more orientated toward giving you results
that people in desktop GIS have already created and allowing you a space to tweak parameters, play with
information a little, to understand something better.

8:51

In the past, GIS started primarily with maps. People made maps to understand the world around them,
they needed to know how to get places and they were exploring the world and writing down what they
saw. Cartography and coordinate systems predate computers by far, you've seen old maps. But was it
GIS? I would say sure because people were using maps and spatial information to understand the world
around them. Formally, however, GIS didn't really begin until the 1960s with the growth of computers
and a definition in a paper that was released at that time.

9:22

At first, GIS was really just publishing algorithms for people to program into their own computers. There
weren't just networks and computer software that people distributed. So algorithms like what can you
see from here were published for others to start to program into their computers. Then as desktop
computers started forming, we had command line tools that were released to run on basic systems like
DOS or Linux or UNIX, at the time.

9:51

And some of those are still around today, some of them aren't. And then desktop GIS, what you are going
to be using, didn't really start until the 1990s and 2000s. It required Macintosh and Windows to develop
that graphical user interface for you to look and see your data on screen in a more refined way. So that's
relatively new in the history of GIS, that the work flows that we're using are possible.

10:18
Today GIS is changing pretty rapidly due to the increased computing power that we have and the widely
available data that we now have. It used to be that you were data constrained and computing power
constrained and now we have lots of computing power and lots of data, sometimes more than we can
handle.

10:34

With that we get increased data resolution, and we can construct more complex models, and run larger
analyses with that.

10:43

We also have much more wide deployment of desktop GIS. That increased computing power is enabling
the learning curve and the barrier to learning to lower and more and more people can make it a part of
their work. So if you're a different specialization of some sort, you may use GIS in some capacity, but it
may not be the only thing you do. It's much more user friendly than it was, but the large processing is still
largely in the realm of specialists.

11:11

We also have increased use of web GIS. And it's starting to have some use in analysis, but it's mostly for
displaying information to end users right now.

11:23

That said, geospatial technology is an underlying framework of the internet and you see it everywhere,
and that is very mature. There are tons of products that are a part of that, but you won't learn about them
in this course. So to wrap it all up, GIS is a lot of things. It can be really anything you want relating to spatial
information and spatial questions and software that helps us understand that. And it can be composed of
a lot of things, too. It doesn't always have to have all these, but software, data, networks, workflows,
procedures, people, those are all major components of what makes GIS, GIS. And then, geography is pretty
old. GIS itself is a pretty new thing and especially desktop GIS. And then the other takeaway would be that
GIS is increasingly common. We've seen the spatial revolution with mobile phones and us carrying location
devices in our pockets and that's only going to grow as time goes on.

A First Look at Using Desktop GIS

[MUSIC] Hello everyone and welcome back. In this lesson I'm going to show you a quick demo of a GIS
project, something that you may encounter in the real world. The goal here is to give you an idea of how
these things work and the kinds of things you might do day to day as a GIS analyst. The emphasis here
isn't on exactly how I'm doing things. I'm not going to walk you through everything and explain all the
concepts in this one. I'm just going to show you a basic workflow and hopefully give you an idea of how
this all works. So, let's proceed. Currently what you're looking at is a satellite image from a satellite called
Landsat that's flown by the US Geological Survey. And what it does is it circles the Earth and covers the
same spots about every 16 days. So it's a good measure of how things change on the Earth. And the area
we're looking at here is a segment of the California coast just above San Francisco. You can see the San
Francisco Bay peeking out right here.

1:05
The reason I'm showing you this area is because a couple major fires just occurred in this area over the
last summer. California has been experiencing a really unprecedented drought and wildfire risk had never
been higher, and some really devastating fires whipped through these areas, and you can see them in the
satellite image. And we'll zoom in and take a look.

1:26

The particular fire we're going to look at is called the Valley Fire. And it's a little hard to make out here,
but this area here is sort of the fire boundary. And you can see this kind of reddish, purplish area that
seems to not have as much green vegetation as some of the surrounding areas. That's the fire.

1:47

What we're looking at in this image is your typical satellite image. It's visible light, the kinds of things that
you can see with your own eye. And we just saw that it's a little hard to make out the fire boundary with
just visible light. The good thing is that satellites have a number of other sensors that pick up a lot of other
information when they're flying over the earth, and using this information we can better visualize the fire
and its impacts. While we can still see only visible light, we can convert some of that data into the colors
that we can see using GIS so that we can sort of adapt and get a sense for what it looks like and I'm going
to turn on an image now that does that.

2:27

This image here is what's called a color infrared or a false color infrared image. And instead of being our
typical red green and blue light that we can see, this visualizes near infrared light, the light that's just past
red on the electromagnetic spectrum as red. And then it visualizes red as green and green as blue, which
is a little counter intuitive at first, but we see some patterns pop out immediately. First, the fire really
peeks out here. Not a whole lot of near infrared light coming off of that fire, but a lot coming off from the
vegetated areas and even the urban areas around it. We also see another fire scar peeking out right here
that I didn't mention to you before. To help you get a sense for what vegetation normally looks like with
satellite imagery, you can see these agricultural fields over here reflect a lot of near infrared light back to
that satellite to pick up.

3:14

So what we're doing here is kind of the first basic use of GIS. We're loading up data and viewing it in a
couple different contexts, and just learning things about it from there. What we learned is that the fire
zone is devegetated and you can see it from satellite imagery.

3:32

Another thing we could do without doing a whole lot of specialized analysis is get a rough sense of the
fire's area just interactively here. So I can use the measure tool and just click around the approximate
boundary here.

3:48

And see that the fire was about 400 square kilometers in area, which is a very large fire. And then if I
wanted to, I could click around this other fire and get a sense for how these two areas compare.
4:01

So now that we've explored this area a little bit, I want to do some analysis on this data and I'm going to
use a set of tools called geo-processing tools to do that. These are where the real investigative power of
GIS comes out. And over here in Arc Toolbox, I have a tool that we made called calculate NDVI. And NDVI
is just a measure of plant health that we can get from aerial and satellite images. And if I run that, I'll close
the measure tool first. If I run that, it gives me a couple options and it's asking for the near infrared raster,
which we'll learn what rasters are soon. And it's asking for the red raster which is right here.

4:47

And it's asking me for an output location. It's giving me a default, I'll just accept that for this demo. If I click
OK, It's going to run and work on combining these rasters together for me and giving me the output of
NDVI, that vegetation index.

5:05

So it's complete and I'll close the box. Now what we're looking at isn't too different from what we were
just looking at in a lot of ways. We still have the same sorts of things bright and the same sorts of things
dark, just in different colors now. But what we've done is we've created a continuous scale from negative
one to one, of is it healthy vegetation, where negative one is no, it's not healthy vegetation, and one is
yes, it is healthy vegetation, and everything in between. And we're symbolizing those as colors on our
screen, so we can see that the dark areas, the lakes, are not healthy vegetation. This makes sense. And
we can see that the crops look like they're healthy vegetation. They're nearly white, which means that
their value is very close to one, and they're probably healthy vegetation. In between, we have this kind of
gray mud in here, where the fires are. And let's see what the value there is. And if I right click on it, I can
Identify. And it brings up this pane over here, and it tells me that the pixel value is 0.178. And that's pretty
consistent with bare earth. It's not a vegetated area.

6:11

So at this point we don't really have any answers that we didn't have before just looking at the false color
infrared imagery. But what we do have is we have this data set that we can then continue to analyze in
the context of our other data and pass through other tools.

6:27

And we've effectively reclassifed everything to provide this new meaning of is it healthy vegetation. And
that's where we could begin another analysis. Let's take a look at one direction we might want to take
that analysis. When an area loses its vegetation in a fire, it becomes much more likely that dirt is going to
end up in the waterways during the next big rainstorm.

6:49

So we might want to know what watersheds are affected by this fire so that we can then go look up or
create other information that helps us understand the impacts of this fire on ecosystems, on people, and
on everything around it.

7:01
To get that started kind of in a simple manner but visually, I'm going to turn on a layer of sub watersheds
covering the state of California, and we'll just see the boundaries here.

7:11

And let's take a look at this one really quickly because it seems to be mostly encompassed by the fire. So
it's probably going to have a lot of impact from that fire. Again, I can right click on it too and Identify and
see a bunch of different attributes of this watershed and that its name is Rocky Creek and Cash Creek. I
can also see it's Huck12ID here. That's a unique identifier that I could then go use to look up information
about this watershed in other databases.

7:39

I might want to do things like look at the local soil and slope information for this watershed to see if there
are populated areas at risk for landslides. I might also look at a database of fish or other aquatic species
information to see what animals and plants or other organisms in the water are going to be impacted if a
lot of sediment ends up in the waterway in a rainstorm. Really, there are so many directions that you
could take an analysis like this, but I want to show you something that is just the starting point for an
analysis. But that shows you the visual way that you assess data and, also, the automated processing way
that you can assess data in ArcGIS.

8:15

We'll leave it there for this lesson, but by the end of this course you're going to be able to understand and
accomplish similar types of things to what we did here, in terms of visualizing and processing your
geographic data. So that's it for now. In this lesson I showed you what one basic type of GIS analysis might
look like. There are so many other types of analysis you can do with GIS, whether you're working with
business analytics or working for utility. But here's one example to help you conceptualize the kind of
work that you might do as a GIS analyst. In the next lesson we'll cover some fundamental terms you need
to know to get started working with GIS. I'll see you there

GIS Terminology to Know

[MUSIC] Welcome back. Now we're going to get into some GIS concepts and terms. Even though
terminology can sometimes be really boring. I think this is where GIS starts to get really fun. You're going
to learn GIS-specific information here that you can take in and use when you start using out GIS.

0:23

In this lesson we're just going to go through these terms here. Points, Lines, and Polygons. Attribute
Tables. Vectors and Features. Rasters and Imagery. Geoprocessing Tools. Geodatabases. Shapefiles. Map
Documents. And Layers. There is a lot more terminology that you can learn for GIS but these are the
fundamentals that I'll get you started. Vector and Feature Data. Vector and feature is relatively
interchangeable, so you can call either one of those. The key defining characteristic here is that it's
categorical data. It's not numbers one through five with decimal places, it's land, sea, ocean, that kind of
stuff, descriptive characteristics are the primary way that you would use vector data. Vector data also has
something that we would call an attribute table. It's a data table, sort of like an Excel spreadsheet, if you're
not used to data bases, that is attached to each vector or featured data set. And every record in that data
table corresponds to features in the GIS space. So if you have something like watersheds, which is
displayed in this graphic, each watershed there has a corresponding row in that data table that tells us
information about that watershed in particular. The columns are all different attributes that we want to
know about in those watersheds.

1:47

To build vector data you need points, lines, and polygons. Those are the primary vector data that you have
in GIS.

1:54

So points build lines, lines build polygons, with points being connected by an edge to make a line and lines
being connected all the way around back to the origin to make a polygon. Points are dimensionless. They
are represented with size, but they're infinitely small in practice.

2:12

Lines are one dimensional. They move in either direction. And each segment of a line can have an attribute
record, just like each point can have an attribute record. And then polygons are by default two
dimensional and each polygon can have an attribute record. One thing to note though is we can add more
dimensions to each of these. We can add a z attribute to them so that they have height data. And then
we can also add time data so that. This attribute or the polygons with the lines or the points have more
or different information through time and so you can time enable your layers. Raster data is the
counterpart to vector data. We talk about GIS data as being either vector data or raster data. There are a
few other types but principally these are the two that you're going to use. Raster data you've probably
seen before, it's the type of data that your digital camera takes. It's best used for imagery like digital
images or continuous surfaces, and what I mean by continuous surfaces is where vector data describes
ocean, sea, land like I talked about. Raster data can be those numbers filling one to a million and any
decimal place in between. So each location can be really related to the ones next to it because they vary
continuously.

3:33

Raster data is composed of a regular grid of pixels with fixed cell size. So let's deconstruct that a little bit.
If you want to think of a regular grid, just draw a Tic-Tac-Toe box for yourself and if all the squares are of
equal size you have a raster there. And if you write different numbers in them that's how raster get their
values and if I write a five in the top left box of the tic-tac-toe box. That whole area that that raster cell
represents has the number five as its value, whatever that number means in this case. If it's elevation,
maybe it's five meters tall. And then the one next to it might have a six and so that ones six meters tall
and the one below it might be eight, something like that. And so Rasters do that through the whole space
that the Raster covers.

4:21

Imagery is also raster data, just like we talked about. But it's oftentimes multiband raster data where you
have multiple values per cell which represent the colors of the color spectrum. So red, green, and blue
each have their own values per cell.
4:36

Rasters can have attributes just like vector data. But it's a little bit different, because in rasters, the
attributes are per value not per pixel so if two cells have that value five, they each take the same attribute
table record. So you can add more information on what it means for a cell to be a five in that case. But
you don't have that per cell, that per feature attribute record like you have with vector data. So that's
raster data. Now we want to process our data. How do we do that? We do that with geoprocessing. Each
GIS package does this slightly differently, but a lot of them have a variation sort of like ArcGIS, which has
geoprocessing tools in Arc toolbox. And that's a slide out panel you'll see when you start using ArcGIS, and
it's full of of algorithms to process or transform data. Everything from really basic stuff of data
management like deleting data sets, which isn't totally straight forward sometimes because of the data
formats, to complex analysis that involves statistical clustering of your data. So that's where you do all of
your processing of your data. They're the work horses of GIS. And, just like programming or physics or
chemistry. Hopefully that's not a four letter word for anybody. You use your data as a starting point and
you start chaining these tools together to make your work flow to make your analysis work. And, in doing
that, you got the output that answers those questions.

6:08

Geodatabases are where we hold our spatial data. You can hold it in other ways, but geodatabases are
nice containers to bring all of your spatial data together. Geodatabases are a general concept, there are
multiple types of geodatabases that you can have. You may hear about file geodatabases, personal
geodatabases, or spatial light geodatabases ArcGIS can use all of this and you can use them in other
systems too sometimes. Geodatabase helps us bring together both feature classes and rasters. Feature
class is being vector data. But also our tabular information, our relationship information and our
annotation information and even more.

6:46

Shapefiles which you may have heard of if you've done a little bit of work with GIS systems before
Shapefiles are often talked about as if they mean vector data in general but they don't. Shapefile is a
specific ESRI format. It's really common, it's a really important format because it's old enough and widely
published enough that it's used as an interchangeable format between different GIS systems. So
Shapefiles can be as few as three different files to make up a Shapefile and as many as seven files on the
disk. So if you happen to send them, need to make sure to grab all of those. So they're a little unwieldy.
The other thing is that in being old, they rely on old standards like dBase IV for their data tables, and that
makes them pretty limiting in terms of what you can do in your attribute tables. I find them to be slow
and large compared to other data formats, but they're incredibly useful and incredibly important because
that's how you often can send data to others you're working with. If the other people you're working with
are using ArcGIS and also have the knowledge to use the geodatabase you can send it to them that way.
But Shapefiles are pretty important for interchange otherwise.

7:59

Map documents are the work space we use to view and analyze our data. They're where we create maps
to send to other people. They're where we our Geoprocessing work files and we load our data into these.
But it's only referencing it on the hard drive, and it represents it in the map document. It displays the
information. And we can change it's color and how it appears, but that doesn't change the underlying
data. That's just for this map document because that's how we're viewing it. We could save that map
document, create a new one using the same data and view that data, differently. They're the backbone
more or less of your GIS. You're going to work from these in most cases.

8:35

To build our map document we use layers. Layers are representations of our datasets from our geo
databases in our map document. They have appearance at this point. We can see them and we can stack
them one on top of the other. To show them together and assess how they look in relation to each other.
If you've used Photoshop or illustrator, it's very similar to those pieces of software.

8:59

So to sum up all of these terminology, we have vector data and we have raster data, those are two primary
data formats. Vector data is best suited for categorical or discrete data. And rasters are best suited to
continuous data. Attribute tables are and especially important for vector data and to attach additional
information, but we can also attach them to raster values. And then geodatabases commonly store our
data on disc. And then map documents and layers allow us to represent our data visually for cartographic
purposes or to provide a workspace for analysis of our data.

Glossary of terms
This document is a glossary of GIS terms you can reference. We'll define most of these in lectures and
readings, but we might use some of them before defining them thoroughly. In the meantime, you can
reference them here.

A downloadable PDF version is available for download at the bottom as well.

GIS Generally

1. Spatial Data – data with a geographic location, representation, or reference point that it describes.

2. Cartography – the science of map making, including data inclusion, layout, elements, colors, and
design. As much as it’s a science, it’s an art form.

3. Shapefile – an Esri proprietary data format for storing geographic data. Very cross-GIS compatible,
but limiting in many aspects. Often misused to mean any geographic dataset as in “could you send me
that shapefile?”

4. Layer – multiple meanings in a GIS context:

a. The distinct data elements that compose a map document, ordered one on top of the next for GIS
drawing order (top is drawn last and seen first)

b. A single data element, saved into a GIS file format along with its associated symbology.

5. Scale – the ratio of the size of elements on screen or in print on the map to their size in the real
world

6. Raster – spatial data that stores location based upon a single origin point and a data stream of
known width, height, and resolution. Often used for continuous surfaces.

a. DEM – Digital Elevation Model. A specific use case of raster data where the pixel value represents
the elevation of areas covered by the pixel. Sometime called a DTM (digital terrain model) or DED (digital
elevation dataset).

7. Vector – spatial data that stores location using Cartesian coordinate locations.

a. Point – A single spot in (usually) two dimensional space. Attributes represent only that location
(and sometimes are inferred to represent nearby locations).

b. Line (Polyline) – Multiple points connected to represent all locations in between along the
connection.

c. Polygon – Multiple polylines connected to create a boundary. Polygon zones are generalized
representations where all locations contained within the boundaries are considered to have the same
property.

8. Coordinate System/Spatial Reference – defines the origin point, coordinate space, and geoid for
a dataset’s spatial data

a. Datum – the origin point of the coordinate system and information required to accurately define
an origin, like a surface model
b. Geographic Coordinate System (GCS) – A coordinate system that specifies latitude and longitude
as coordinates

c. Projected Coordinate System – similar to and includes a GCS. “Projects”/transforms coordinates

into a new coordinates system to display a map in 2D space. Sometimes referred to as “the projection” of
a dataset.

9. Resolution – the density of data of a raster dataset or rasterized map document. Sometimes used
to mean the density of data in any dataset. For raster datasets, this value is expressed as the length of the
side of a pixel (eg: 10m pixels). For rasterized graphic formats, it is most commonly expressed in pixels per
inch of paper (ppi) or dots per inch of paper (dpi) and a good target to reach is 300 dpi for clear prints.

10. Geoprocessing – the practice of using GIS tools to process, transform, filter, and query GIS data.

11. Python – a programming language with capabilities for GIS analysis. Useful for automating tasks
in GIS.

12. Join – The use of a common attribute to link data tables in order to access the attributes of one
along with the other or assign the attributes of one to the other based upon a key value. When this is the
record ID of the other dataset, it’s often a foreign key. Eg: summary statistics tables built for HUC12s,
stored in separate datasets can be linked back to the HUC12 by the HUC12 ID.

13. Spatial Join – Similar to a Join in that it transfers attributes, but the linkage used to connect the
datasets is the location of each item. I find this to be the “hammer” of GIS.

14. Symbology – the representation of a particular dataset in a map document.

15. Tables – a data structure with a defined set of fields, and many rows representing individual data
records.

a. Fields (columns) – a variable represented in a data table. Instances of this field can be looked up
per record to find the value
b. Rows – individual data records

c. Primary Key – an identifier attribute, usually assigned automatically by the database management
engine, that provides a unique integer value by which to reference a data record.

16. Environment Variables (Environments) – variables/settings that affect the run of a geoprocessing
tool. In other computer systems, variables that affect how programs are found and run.

17. Basemap – a prerendered set of mapping data that can be placed below the data of interest to
quickly create a map with context. Frequently, a basemap is served up over the Internet by a basemap
server and loaded on the fly by your GIS.

ArcGIS Specific

1. ArcMap – the interface for geographic data analysis, querying, layout, and export.

2. ArcCatalog – the interface for geographic data management.

3. ArcToolbox – a suite of tools, available from both ArcMap and ArcCatalog, for analyzing,
transforming, and querying geographic data.

4. Map Document – much like a Word document, a map document stores information about a
particular map and its layout. It does not store the geographic data or import it and so a map document
file cannot be sent in the same way as other documents

5. MXD (See Map Document) – File extension for map documents. Often used as a synonym for it
(eg: “do you have the MXDs?”)

6. Data View – the interface used to view and query data in ArcGIS.

7. Layout View – the interface used to design and lay out a map for export - all nongeographic
elements such as title, data sources, scale bar, etc.
a. Data Frame – the container for layers in layout or data view, but also the viewport for data on the
page in layout view.

8. Feature Class – data stored in an ESRI geodatabase. A feature class is a collection of features with
the same geometry type, projection, and fields. Can be commonly thought of as a dataset.

9. Personal Geodatabase – A type of geodatabase that uses Microsoft Access 2003 format databases
as the container, allowing it to be used as a database within Access and for spatial data. A super handy
tool to have in your back pocket if you understand relational databases.

10. File Geodatabase – An Esri proprietary database format. Data stored within it is obfuscated and
can only be accessed reliably from Esri software. Faster and more efficient than other storage methods
and able to store huge datasets and large amounts of data overall.

11. Default Geodatabase – The default location that ArcMap will use to save geoprocessing and
export products. It saves you from always having to define locations for data. It is defined for each map
document and can be changed upon loading the document, in map document properties, or in
environment setttings.

12. Spatial Analyst – An extension to ArcGIS that adds significant raster processing functionality. Many
of the tools are useful for a watershed GIS workflow.

13. Table of Contents – the set of layers in ArcGIS. Provides access to layer properties and tools.

Remote Sensing

1. Orthophoto – an aerial photo whose pixels are location corrected for the differential distortion
created by the lens and elevation of land.

Watershed Analysis

2. Watershed – The entire land area contributing to the water flow at an outlet or stream junction.

3. Contributing Watershed – a watershed based upon an arbitrary point of interest (a dam, etc)
4. Blue Lines – a cartography term for streams.

5. NHD – National Hydrography Dataset – A dataset that contains water bodies and streamlines for
the United States.

a. Flowlines – the streamlines contained within NHD

6. WBD – Watershed Boundary Dataset – a dataset containing nested watershed boundaries for the
United States

7. NHDPlus – an enhanced version of NHD that adds additional attributes for each streamline, such
as contributing area, flow, elevation, WBD, etc. Often used in place of NHD.

8. HUCs – Hydrologic Unit Codes – the watersheds created by the WBD. Usually designated by their
size with the digit length (2,4,6,8,10,12) indicating the scale with 12 being the most specific and refined.
HUC8s in CA are likely familiar, and HUC12 are useful for refined scale mapping.

Other

1. Color Ramp – the scale of colors used to symbolize a range of values in a map

Tour of ArcMap
[MUSIC] In this demo we're going to take a brief look at the interface of ArcMap, one of the pieces of
software that make up ArcGIS. Before we open it up I want you to think for a moment about what you
expect a GIS software package to be like. What do you imagine interfacing with it is like? Do you type in
commands, are you drawing things on screen, is it like using Google maps? How do you interface with it
for analyzing your data, for viewing your data, for showing it to others?

0:40

ArcMap uses a lot of different interface paradigms. Some of them you're going to be really used to, and
some of them are going to be brand new. And that's the point of this screencast here, is to show you
which of those you'll be familiar with and where to explore for the rest of it.

0:56

I'm running Windows 10, so to launch it, I can bring up my start menu, and it's going to look a little different
than what you're used to. But if I bring up my start menu and click all apps, once our GIS is installed, I'll
see it in an ArcGIS subfolder under A. And I can start up ArcMap 10.3 from here. I could also type it in the
search box here, and it should come up there. And that'll work on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows
10.

1:25

ArcGIS takes a little while to launch depending on your computer. This is a decent computer that I'm on
right now, and it usually takes it about a minute, and it will go through three phases, the initializing license,
initializing application, and initializing document phase or loading document phase. And depending upon
your environment and where you license is coming from it can take anywhere from 15 seconds to a minute
or a couple of minutes. So don't be worried if it takes a little while to load.

1:53

Once it loads up we get this getting started dialogue that shows up, and it shows us templates. We can
create map templates, and we'll potentially go over that later. But the thing I want you to notice here is
this default Go Database option. This is where ArcGIS, by default, stores data that you're working with,
any products that you're creating by default with go there. And you can specify that for the map document
right off the bat.

2:21

Open a new map document from here. I can click cancel and I'll still get a blank map document, or I can
click okay once I have a template selected, and it'll use that template to create a new map for me. In this
case since it's a blank map anyway I'm going to accept the default geo database and click okay.

2:37

Right off the bat, first things I would notice as a new user are that there's a menu bar up here. You're
probably familiar with menu bars from many other applications. They're starting to disappear in newer
software packages, including in ArcGIS Pro you don't have this as much. But the classic example would be
Microsoft Office has a ribbon interface. ArcMap still has kind of that classic interface where you have a
menu bar with a file menu. And then you have these toolbars up here that I can rearrange by grabbing
this little control and moving it to where I want.

3:09

And they have all these little icons that do different things. Some of these are going to be brand new and
very specific to ArcGIS and some of the them are going to be super familiar like the save, the print, the
open, and the new, or tools. So, the rest of this interface, though, is pretty specific to ArcGIS. I encourage
you, when you first open ArcGIS to explore these menus for yourself

3:35

and see what's in there, because that's going to be a way that you'll start figuring out pieces of the
software that maybe we don't cover in this course or that we don't cover in-depth in the area that you're
interested in and to explore the tool bars, too.

3:48

Before we do that in this demo, I want to quickly go over the rest of the interface.
3:54

ArcGIS is mostly composed of things that we call panes. So over here we have the table of contents pane
or window. We can bring these up under the windows menu in here so if I lost the table of contents pane
by clicking X and getting rid of it, I can go back to windows and click table of contents and it's going to
come back up.

4:15

I can also dock table of contents so that it goes over to the side just like the catalog and search panes on
the right. And then it automatically disappears for me when I don't want it and if I hover on it it comes
back out when hovered. And it will disappear again when I move my mouse off. Or I can click on it to bring
it back up and then pin it back down, just like it was when we started, using that little pin at the top, the
auto hide button.

4:39

I can change the size of panes by hovering over them and dragging, and for those of you who really like to
customize your interfaces or who have different size monitors, you can click and drag to pull the pane off
of where it is now, and dock it to somewhere else. And there are multiple options for this. I'm not going
to cover them all right now, but the most common ones are to just dock it to another side. And if I bring
it over to this blue button here, we'll dock it to the right side there just like catalog and search.

5:11

And if I auto-hide it here, it auto-hides to the right.

5:14

But if I wanted to get to join catalog and search though, I can make those fly out and they're going to be
right next to each other here. And then, if I tear off table contents again and bring it to the bottom of this
window. I can then attach it to the bottom there or I can make it another part of this by dragging it again
and hovering over the pane that I want it to be in. And if I hold it over that center, there's that little icon
there that looks right at the bottom like it has tabs, and that's what they are. If I attach it there I get a tab
with table of contents, search, and catalog over here, which if I pin them down, they all hide together and
if I bring them out, I get still just the one.

5:58

So I'm going to put Table of Contents back where it started because that tends to be where I like it. And I
just tore off all three as you can see. So I need to tear off Table of Contents using that bottom tab and
dock it back to the left.

6:15

We also, as you just saw, we have a search and a catalog pane. Catalog is a full art catalog window.
ArcCatalog is a separate application and so we are going to go through a lot of that later. Know that there
is a catalog window here. I am going to hide it for now, and search. Search gives us local search. ArcGIS
online search and enterprise search. For now, we'll focus on local search, and this is a way we can bring
up tools or data once we have them on our machine. The tools are built in, and data, as you start to build
it, ArcGIS is going to index it and let you search for it.

6:48

I'm going to hide that back again.

6:51

And let's take a quick look at some of the menus here.

6:57

What I tend to go looking for first thing when it opened up a new application is I want to know what
options the application has so like ArcGIS has lots of different ways to customize applications in ways that
your auctions depending upon the context of what you doing, but the big one for the full application itself
is under. The customized menu, intuitively enough, and then ArcMap options and if I bring that up, I get
this beefy dialogue full of different tabs. A lot of the ones that you may find yourself wanting to adjust
right off the bat are on this first general tab. One thing that gets a lot of new users is the mouse wheel
and continuous zoom pan tool.

7:37

I personally, or by default ArcGIS when you roll your mouse wheel forward it zooms out. I like it if it zooms
in when I do that. Some people like it when it zooms out and so you can set that yourself. If I click apply
it'll save those settings and leave the dialog open. The other thing that we'll talk more about later is the
option to make relative paths to default from new mapped documents. We'll talk more about what that
when we define how mapped documents work and what relative paths are in another lecture. But for
now, I'll check that box. A few other tabs that you might want to check out on this bottom row here And
one that I like to set is enable hardware acceleration for supported layers if you have a decent graphics
card. This is going to make certain types of layers dispel more quickly. So I usually set that because this
computer does have hardware acceleration. And then another one to check out is metadata. I'm not going
to change anything here yet because when we get to checking out our catalog, I want it to show you what
it shows by default, but note that there are different styles of metadata. That is, the data that describes
the process and the function and the form of the data that we're loading and we can view it in different
formats. And a really common one is the FGDCCSDGM metadata. Usually I select that as my metadata
format. We'll select that later on in this class but for now we'll leave it as item description.

8:59

And I'm going to click okay, and that's going to save out my preferences and bring me back to application.

9:05

So one thing I haven't talked about yet, though, is this big white space in the middle here. Probably given
the amount of space given to it, the most important part of it. What goes on in there? That's where we
view our data. So, let's add some data know so we can take a look at it.

9:23
And if I click on this button here, I get some options for adding data. I can add data directly from my
computer, I can add a base map which is sort of like Google Maps where You have premade tiles of map
information that are just cartographic, they just show you information. You can't analyze them, but they
provide context for the rest of your data that you've added. Or you can add data from ArcGIS online. So
I'm going to click Add Data.

9:53

And I'm going to bring in just a California counties layer that I have in a geodatabase. And we'll go through
how to find these later, but I'm going to bring in the counties layer.

10:03

Then I'll click add and our GIS knows how to draw this automatically. And it gives it some colors and some
boundary line colors and styles immediately. So that I can view it in this window here right off the path.
Notice what happen to when were in the table of contents though I have a counties layer and there's a
lot of interaction that we can do over here to specify how we wanted to see our counties layer. But the
only one I'm going to show you right now is that I can turn off the counties layer and make it disappear.
As we add more layers, that's going to be a very important function for us to export data.

10:38

Right now I'm looking at the full extent of the California counties layer but if I want to zoom in, I can use
my scroll wheel and zoom in.

10:48

And it follows where my cursor's pointing and zooms toward it. By default, you can change them in the
options. Or I can use the tools up in the tool bar, the zoom in and zoom out tools, and I can click and drag
to select the region that I want it to show on screen. Similarly, I can zoom out by a certain amount, and
by using the zoom out tool. And then I can use the Hand tool, the Pan tool, to drag the map around just
like you're used to in things like Google Maps or Bing Maps or whatever mapping service you use. And if I
want to go back to see all of the layers on the map I can click Full Extent and it takes me back out.

11:25

One thing to note about that full extent tool, though, is if I have a base map layer on, it's going to zoom
me out effectively to the whole earth. And, so, if you're showing a lot of data that your interested in, in a
local area, you're going to, instead, want to go, let's zoom back in for a moment, and right click on the
layer that maybe best represents your whole boundary, and just do zoom to layer.

11:48

There are a lot of options in the right-click menu, right? And so, that's another thing to note here, is, a lot
of things in ArcGIS appear in right-click menus. So if you're wondering if you have more options
somewhere, try right-clicking on it and see what comes up. We're going to go through Almost all of this
at some point in this class, but for now know that there's that menu and you should explore it.

12:11
To wrap up this interface tour I want to show you how to add more tools to your view here. So ArcGIS is
based upon this tool bar model where most of its functionality appears in these tools here. There are a
few other ways to access it that we'll show you later on. But for now, know that if I right click in a blank
space up at the top here, I get a menu full of different tool bars. A massive menu full of different tool bars
I can add. And you'll see the ones that we have upright checked. We have Standard and Tools. This first
one on the left here, that's standard. And this one here is tools. So there is a lot of other functionality
that's hiding in here. And if you right-click and bring up one of these toolbars you'll be able to add
additional functionality. Right away to your map document. So if I select the draw toolbar here.

13:04

It pops up and it's floating. I can drag it around, and just like the pane, I can dock it up here if I want to.
And so if I move it around, I'll be able to dock it. And that way I have all my toolbars in one spot.

13:16

And the drawing toolbar does exactly what it says, it gives me the ability to do things like creating
rectangles in my view here or add text. In practice you mostly want to do that when you are getting ready
to export a map for other people to use, but its one of the set of tools and its a toolbar.

13:34

To bring this all to a close, let's save our map document. A map document is exactly what it sounds like.
Just like a Microsoft Office document, you're going to save it and the things that you've done in here are
going to be saved into one file that you can open and share with other people. The counties layer that I
added, that's not contained in the map document. The map document just references it where I loaded it
from. And so if I ship it off, we'll need to do some special things that we'll go through in another lecture.
But only in this California counties and note that I used an underscore. That is a personal preference these
days, but it is a legacy of when ArcGIS wasn't very good with spaces so, you might make it a habit and find
that things get a little easier if you do. Save this type, ArcMap document in my ArcGIS folder, which is part
of my documents folder and if I click save, I now have dot in the title bar and I can reopen it later if I want
to.

14:29

That's it for this demo. That's how you open ArcGIS create a new map document and find the tools you
need in order to do your analysis and explore your data. Thanks and I'll see you in the next lecture.

Data Representation in GIS

[MUSIC] Hello, again and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to talk about how GIS data is structured
and what that means for how you collect and process data. To understand data types, we're going to take
this scene I drew and look at how it might translate into geospatial data. This is just a basic sketch and I'm
no artist, but pretend for a moment that this is a real world scene of a river in blue with vegetation on
both sides in green and patches of dirt with no grass or vegetation in the tan color.

0:36
So now, the central question is how do we conceptually translate this location into geospatial data? Before
dive in, I want you to think about data collection for a moment. In some way, data collection is always in
an approximation of the real world. We can't capture everything about a location in our data, so we
discard the information that's not important to our particular application of that data and collect the
things that are meaningful to us whether it's how it looks or what it does.

1:03

For example, think about the contacts manager application in your phone or in your Rolodex for some of
you. The information you store about a person isn't a complete description of them. It's things like a phone
number, an email address, maybe their physical address, maybe some other notes. As a profile of a
person, it's an approximation. It's not sufficient to recreate a person by any means, but for certain uses
it's exactly what we need. GIS data is the same. We simplify the world into data structures we can use in
our work.

1:35

There are many types of data, but we'll talk about four of them right now. Rasters and then the vector
data types of points, lines and polygons. Remember that points are dimensionless, just a location in space
and the size of them is purely based on how we choose to symbolize or display them on our map. Lines
are one-dimensional in principle, but two-dimensional once you start collecting multiple segments to form
things like roads and then polygons cover an area and are typically used to group locations that we're
classifying as being of the same type. Overall, vector data is great for discrete observations.

2:11

The main alternative to the vector data types is to use a raster, instead. Remember that these are grids
like a chess board, where each cell or pixel can have a value. If we want to cover more area, we can't just
add more features like we can with vector data. We need to add more rows or columns to the raster and
indicate values even if it's a null or unknown value for everything in those rows and columns. These are
the best bet for use cases where your data needs to vary continuously across the landscape.

2:42

So thinking again about the scene we were just looking at. If we take it to be what reality looks like, how
do we approximate it as GIS data? The first choice is what type of GIS features to use? Probably, the
simplest way that we can turn this scene into the GIS data is just marking out points of features of interest.
I can start by simply creating points where the dirt patches are located.

3:05

This gives me a simple representation of the scene. We don't have the grass locations or the river, we
could potentially turn those into points two, but that doesn't make as much sense as turning these dirt
patches into points.

3:18

Again, a reminder that this is an approximation of our data. What we create here isn't going to give us the
exact dirt patches, but it shows us the locations of the patches and we can use data attributes, which will
cover more in an upcoming lecture to help us characterize them in other ways that we can measure.
3:36

For the river, I am more likely to want to turn that into a line instead of points. That makes a lot more
sense for something like a river or roads. This line is still an approximation of the river's location. We don't
get width information for this locations. But again, we can add attributes that give us specific information
about the river that we can observe it an other way. The location itself is best represented by a line and
what if I want to characterize the land cover in general? In this case, maybe I would want to use polygons.
I can draw polygons representing the boundaries of these dirt patches and at that point, I have area
information for them and can see how they relate to everything else a little better.

4:19

I can also draw the boundaries of the vegetation areas, which happen to surround the dirt patches, but
there will be holes in the vegetation polygons for them.

4:33

And then if I want to, I can draw out the river as well.

4:38

When I'm done, I can just draw letters in to visualize the attributes that I might put on these polygons. In
a real world use case, I would most likely do polygons or points for the dirt patches. Polygons for the
vegetation, depending upon the type of the vegetation and then a line for the river.

4:59

What about if I want to use a raster format instead? In fact, some lane covered datasets do use rasters.
To start with, let's draw out a bare bones grid, so we can visualize our raster. These lines don't actually
exist in our dataset, but for us to image a raster, it helps to see them. Also raster cells, the squares here
are usually of equal width and height, so ignore the not uniformity in my drawing here.

5:25

Remember that a key component of a raster dataset is that every location within a cell has the same value,
because each cell codes for just one value. This is easy for the first few items, which we can say, consist
almost entirely of grass and I'll draw that in here.

5:42

But what about for the cells that have mixed portions of dirt and grass and river? These mixed pixels can
be assigned values by a couple of different rules. We can either assign by the majority value or by what
value is in the center of the pixel. In this case, I'm going to approximate assigning values by majority and
write in g for Grass, D for dirt, W for water based on what I think it looks like the value would be. When
we're done, what we would have is cells with single colors representing their uniform values. Our raster
would most likely be stored with integer values like one, two, three. Coding for these different land cover
types, but here I've represented them with the letters instead.

6:22
So again, let's think of the inaccuracies we introduced in our translation of our real world data into a GIS
dataset. If the values of these raster cells are uniform, then we lose a ton of precision about the world
here when we assign these mixed pixels to a single value. This is inherent to taking data. The best way to
minimize it is by choosing the data format that makes the most sense for the place you are working with
and the analysis you intend to do. We'll go through these concerns a little more in another course in the
specialization, but it's something to keep in mind for now. That's it for this lesson. I hope you have a better
understanding of the different GIS data types and when you would choose to use them. See you in the
next lecture.

Este curso ayudará bastante a alcanzar mis metas profesionales en la medida que complementará de
manera efectiva mi formación como ingeniero civil, y además me certificará en conocimientos básicos en
Sistemas de Información Geográfica, el cual me servirá para aplicar a trabajos donde sea necesario el
análisis espacial por medio de GIS. La importancia de los GIS en la ingeniería civil es muy grande, por lo
cual tener un certificado en esta área me dará un plus a la hora de querer alcanzar mis metas profesionales
en este campo, el cual es un campo del conocimiento que me atrae mucho y el cual me gustaría
profundizar. Este curso al ser ofertado por una universidad de renombre, ayudará a hacer más atractiva
mi hoja de vida, es por esto que para mi el certificado es muy importante, ya que es una manera tangible
de mostrar mis conocimientos adquiridos en este curso y crecer profesionalmente de una manera que
me permita seguir realizando más cursos por medio de esta plataforma.