GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS) COURSE

PRACTICAL LESSONS 2020/2021

Gorica Bratic
[email protected]

GEOlab – Politecnico di Milano

Exercise

Practice learning objectives

 Learn about data types we are going to deal with during practice lessons
GIS data types - Vector

• Vector data represent real world features with points

(e.g. trees), lines (e.g. river) or polygons (e.g. roads and
houses).
• Point is the basic feature of the vector i.e. lines and
polygons consists of points which are interconnected. In
case of lines the connection between points do not form
enclosed shape, while in the case of polygons it does.
• Position of a point is defined as a set of two coordinates.
Third coordinate can be used optionally to represent a
height. Position of line or polygon is defined by set of
coordinates for each point they consist of.
• Depending on the map scale or preferences same real-
world feature can be described with different vector
features (e.g. tree can be point, but also polygon; road
can be line, but also polygon, etc.)
• Vectors usually come with attribute table in which each
feature can have numerous attributes that describe it
better
GIS data types - Vector

• Vectors usually come with attribute table

• Every attribute of a feature is stored in a new column
• Each separate feature is a single row in attribute table
• Attributes can be numerical values, text (string), date,
time, etc.

id Type Width Length_m

1 Public 4 400

2 Proprietary 4 100

100
3 Proprietary 4

Example of attribute table for roads

GIS data types - Rasters

• Raster is grid of cells where each cell contains certain

value representing some real-world phenomena.
• Raster can represent discrete phenomena like
land cover
• Raster can represent also continuous phenomena
like temperature or elevation or spectral data such
as satellite images and aerial photographs
• Scanned maps are also rasters
• Raster resolution determines level of detail raster can
capture
• The location of each cell in raster can be defined
knowing:
• Raster coordinate system (e.g. Cartesian)
• Coordinate of raster origin (typically the upper
Source: https://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/10.3/manage-data/raster- left or the lower left corner of the raster)
and-images/GUID-6754AF39-CDE9-4F9D-8C3A-D59D93059BDD-web.png • Cell size
• Count of rows and columns
Exercise

Practice learning objectives

 Learn about data types we are going to deal with during practice lessons
 Get to know basics some basic information about coordinate reference systems
Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS)

Geographic coordinate system – simplified explanation

• 3D spherical surface e.g. globe

• Units: decimal degrees (not
always)
• Longitude (φ) and latitude (λ)
• Good for global mapping
• Not reliable for quantifying
distance
• Example: WGS84

Source: https://www.earthdatascience.org/images/courses/earth-
analytics/spatial-data/latitude-longitude-globe-ESRI.gif
Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS)

Projected coordinate system

– simplified explanation
• Transformation of 3D surface to
2D in order to be able to draw a
map on paper or screen
• Never absolutely accurate -
distortions of angular
conformity, distance and/or area
• Northing (Y) and easting (X)
• Units: meters (not always!)
• Example: UTM
https://www.earthdatascience.org/images/courses/earth-analytics/spatial-
data/spatial-projection-transformations-crs.png
Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS)

• Always pay attention in which CRS your data is!

• Combining data with different CRSs can produce error! The magnitude of error
depends on the differences in the CRSs parameters.
• Displaying data that comes from different CRS usually is not a problem because most of
GIS software reproject them “on the fly”.

• CRS affects units of measurements

Units of measurement will be expressed based on the default units of CRS. Therefore in
most of the cases when data have geographic CRS the units of measurements will be
degrees, while for the data in projected CRS unit will be meter.
For example, if raster is given in WGS84 geographic CRS its resolution will be expressed
in degrees, while if it is given in the projected CRS like UTM the resolution will be
expressed in meters.
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