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 considers digital elevation models (DEMs) as one way of representing surfaces. It describes how DEMs are created and used, particularly in hydrology. Approaches for estimating elevation, slope and aspect, and for determining drainage networks are presented, along with a discussion of issues that may arise when automatically determining drainage networks from DEMs.

This unit begins a three part module introducing concepts and techniques of spatial decision-making. Although it is far from a complete coverage of the topic, it will provide students with a sampling of the kinds of decision-making activities GIS will be required to support. This unit introduces students to the concept of multiple criteria decision making, outlines some of the simpler strategies developed to solve multiple criteria problems and demonstrates the potential applicability of GIS.

This unit examines legal issues surrounding GIS. As a legal and economic entity, information may be quantified, owned, valuated, and used as evidence to resolve conflict, though none of these tasks is trivial. Liability scenarios—including errors in represented location and inappropriate uses of data—are discussed along with access and ownership issues, such as privacy and confidentiality, copyright and conflict of laws.

This unit focuses on line generalization as it relates to GIS and cartography. Techniques including simplification, smoothing, feature displacement, line enhancement and merging are described, and several linear simplification algorithms are summarized. Approaches for mathematically evaluating simplification are outlined, and justifications for simplifying linear data are discussed.

This unit introduces the different ways users can interact with GIS. It also provides an introduction to the range of interfaces available and will help students recognize differences between different GISs.

This unit introduces hierarchical data structures for storing raster data, focusing on quadtrees and quadtree variants. The process of coding quadtrees and accessing data through a quadtree are described, and different data structures are compared.

This is the fourth in a six-unit series on the design, purchase and implementation of a GIS. It discusses benchmarking, which allows a vendor’s proposed system to be evaluated in a controlled setting. Qualitative and quantitative benchmarking are described, and an example mathematical model developed for a quantitative benchmark is explained. Preparation for and execution of benchmarking are illustrated with an example from Alberta Government Telephones.

This unit considers how to construct digital objects—i.e., points, lines and areas—out of sets of coordinates and how to represent their attributes and relationships. Strategies for representing this information in a GIS database are presented and illustrated with examples, and issues with each are discussed.

This unit considers how the geometry of lines and areas is coded in a GIS database. Different techniques for coding straight lines, arcs of circles, and splines are presented, and advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed.