General Concepts
What does GIS mean??
Geographical information systems!
What is one way that the GIS department at a university campus can improve their GIS map representing their campus?
Open to many answers from this! Could include discussing with students in how they specifically walk around campus as they typically have better ideas of how to travel around on different footpaths that faculty at a school may not even be aware of.
What elements must be included within a map?
Title, legend, scale bar, date, north arrow, sources!
What is the clip tool? Name a short example of how you would use it.
Extracts the input features that overlays a clip feature.
An example would be I want to look at the locations of schools around in San Diego. However, I only want it to display schools within my own town of University City. Therefore, I would clip a layer of all SD schools to a layer that just outlines my town so I only have schools located in UTC.
Name a few pieces of information that you may find in the attribute table for a grocery stores layer.
Names of grocery stores, x and y coordinates of where they are located, size of building in square foot.
What is the difference between GIS and mapping?
Mapping is simply placing things on a map. GIS is to input data on a map and utilize different tools to create an informative final piece that makes the reader aware of something that couldn’t be extracted previously from just placing things on a map.
Give me one example of how GIS has been used by communities for planning and policy making.
I thought of the example described in the geospatial revolution video. A community used demographic and health data overlaid on one another to determine where is the best place for a grocery store to be built in an area where the community was struggling to buy fresh produce and healthy food for their families.
What is one way to display the location of a smaller area in relation to a larger area in the world on a map?
Inset map!
What is a coordinate system? Why are they needed??
Coordinate system is the method for identifying the location of a point on the earth. Usually use coordinate points which is in the x and y dimension to display a location. Projection allows us to display a coordinate system and data on a flat surface. These are needed as the Earth is not flat!
What is the difference between spatial accuracy and spatial precision?
Spatial accuracy: how close a recorded location is to its true position on Earth.
Spatial precision: how exactly a location is depicted on a map regardless of its accuracy.
What is metadata. what is included in it and why is it important?
It is data about the data that includes information such as who created the layer, when it was created, spatial and attribute descriptions, projections & coordinate systems, scale. It is important because we need to make sure our data is accurate and is coming from a trustworthy source.
I want to display the population of people with asthma in each county in California AND the locations of all factories. How would you do this using graduated colors, graduated symbols AND/OR dot density?
I would use graduated colors to represent the percentage of population with asthma with points to represent factories.
What is bad about this map? What would you change?
What is the union tool? Name a short example of how you would use it.
Computes a geometric union of input features.
I have two datasets of parks that are located in San Diego. However, they are of separate areas and I want to create one layer of all parks included in both areas. Union will allow you to join those two layers together and create one big layer for parks.
I want to create a query to look up buildings that are houses (out of apartments, houses, and townhomes) in San Diego that have a rental price of less than 1k a month. What does this query look like using TYPE and PRICE. Bonus: is this an attribute or spatial query?
A: TYPE = House AND Price < 1000. This is an attribute query as it is using information directly regarding housing in terms of type and price and not basing the query on the spatial location of buildings. An example of spatial query is: what buildings are located within University City? This would require us to use coordinate spatial data instead.