National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

This short narrative introduces the Core Curriculum in GIS and provides a historical overview of the Core Curriculum Project, including the later Core Curriculum in GIScience and Core Curriculum for Technical Programs. Appended to this description is an original pamphlet advertising the Core Curriculum in GIS.

This unit is the first of two that focuses on spatial interpolation—the procedure of estimating the value of properties at unsampled sites within the area covered by existing observations. It discusses several different methods for classifying spatial interpolation procedures, such as point vs. areal, global vs. local, and exact vs. approximate. Several point-based methods are described, both exact—proximal, B-splines, Kriging and manual (“eyeballing”)—and approximate—trend surface analysis, Fourier series and moving average/distance weighted average.

This unit considers natural resource-based GISs, including their contents, characteristics and uses. Common sources of data including thematic maps, topographic maps and remotely sensed imagery are described and relevant techniques such as image interpretation and classification are introduced. The unit concludes with a description of an example database, the Minnesota Land Management Information System (MLMIS).

This unit builds on the previous unit, examining strategies for implementing GIS in large organizations. By way of example it describes the development and implementation of a national GIS strategy within the US Forest Service, from functional requirements studies at individual sites through national plan development and plan components.

This unit begins with an overview of GIS applications used in resource management, describing characteristics and functionality of these systems, and the organizations that adopted them. The body of the unit demonstrates an application of GIS to natural resource management through an example—the Big Darby Creek Project—in which the GIS provides data input, storage, output and some analytic capabilities. The project combines a GIS (ERDAS) with a nonpoint source pollution model (AGNPS) to provide a low-cost, user-friendly system and database to support land use planning and management for the basin.

This unit introduces some fundamental concepts of graphic design. It discusses technical issues of label placement and general principles of graphical excellence and presents and an introduction to principles of map design.

This unit discusses standards in GIS—why they are important, who establishes them and what types of standards are relevant to GIS. It gives an overview of the types of standards for operating systems, user interfaces, networking, database query, display and plotting and data exchange.

This unit delves deeper into database concepts introduced in the previous unit. It describes requirements of a database for spatial data including data security concerns, ability to support concurrent users, security against data loss, and prevention of unauthorized use.

This unit begins a two-part introduction to vector GIS. The vector data model for representing points, lines and areas is described, and the process of creating a vector database is outlined and illustrated with an example application where areas suitable for logging are identified

This unit begins the section on data acquisition by looking at how the infinite complexity of the real world can be discretized and sampled. It considers sampling techniques and associated issues of accuracy and standards.