Maps and Software
Three elements that are essential to a map
What is Title, Legend, and Scale?
You have a spreadsheet containing Address, City, State, and ZIP Code, but no coordinates. You want to put these locations on a map. This GIS process converts the addresses into geographic coordinates.
What is geocoding?
You want to identify all schools located within 500 meters of a proposed highway. First, you create this type of zone around the highway.
What is a buffer?
A not so favored GIS task usually passed off to summer interns.
What is digitizing?
A dataset shows individual trees as points, roads as lines, and city boundaries as polygons. This data model represents geographic features using these discrete geometries.
What is vector data?
You have a roads layer covering the entire state, but your project only concerns one county. This tool removes the portions of the roads outside your county boundary.
What is Clip?
In ESRI terminology, a name given to a GIS database
What is a Geodatabase?
A satellite image is made up of a grid of cells, where each cell stores a value such as elevation, temperature, or reflectance. This GIS data model is being used.
What is raster data?
You have a parcel layer with fields for Owner, LandUse, and AssessedValue. You want to identify all parcels where LandUse = "Commercial" without using their location on the map. This is the tool you would use.
What is Select by Attribute?
Unlike a shapefile, this GIS data format can be stored inside a geodatabase and supports advanced geodatabase capabilities such topology and relationship classes.
What is a feature class?
This information tells you where a raster dataset came from, when it was created, its spatial resolution, coordinate system, and other details needed to judge whether the data are appropriate for your analysis.
What is metadata?
You have a layer of census tracts and a layer showing flood zones. You want to create a new layer showing only the portions of census tracts that overlap flood zones, with information from both datasets available for the resulting features. This is the tool you need.
What is Intersect?