National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

This introduction provides a historical overview of the GIS Core Curriculum for Technical Programs. It describes the working group and initial work session where a framework for the curriculum was developed, and it includes a task list outlining the topics originally intended for the curriculum.

An outline of the GIS Core Curriculum for Technical Programs, organized by topic, is presented with hyperlinks to each unit's material on eScholarship. Note that hyperlinks are only active if the PDF file is downloaded.

This unit introduces digitizing—the transformation of information from an analog format to a digital format—as it relates to GIS. It describes essential points to consider when planning a digitizing project including scale, coordinate system, accuracy and software constraints.

The Core Curriculum for Technical Programs (CCTP) concentrates on providing course content assistance for instructors. It is intended to support a full range of courses that would be taught at a 2-year college. This guide is designed to provide a quick overview for the GIS instructor on the use of the CCTP resources to create GIS course modules and design GIS courses.

This unit describes the fundamental concepts of statistics in a light-hearted manner that attempts to express the key ideas of this critical intellectual building block without being overly technical or boring. The concepts of mean, median, mode, variance and standard deviation are introduced through example applications that range from comparing samples from two geographical sites to household food distribution.

This unit introduces some of the uses of digital terrain data, the types of elevation data available and how to obtain them. Through examples and discussion it presents examples of data sources and formats, software for viewing and processing elevation data, and a comprehensive list of data and software resources.

This unit provides the instructor with a simple overview of GIS. After learning the material covered in this unit, the student should be able to provide a general definition for GIS; list some of the application areas of GIS; provide examples of how GIS is used; and describe topics that will be learned in an introductory study of technical GIS.

This unit’s overview of Global Positioning System (GPS) data includes sections on GPS equipment and definitions, accuracy considerations, project preplanning, collecting and correcting data and exporting data. Procedures for a sample implementation, using GPS to collect utility data, are described using Pathfinder Office software to create a new project and data dictionary, transferring the data dictionary to a datalogger, using Quick Plan software to preplan data collection, using the ProXL Datalogger to collect data, downloading the data to a PC, differentially correct the data using base station data, and exporting the results to ArcView.

This unit describes basic concepts related to the scanning of air photos, including vocabulary, potential applications, spatial scale and file size considerations and image processing software. Image types (e.g., 1-bit black and white, 8-bit grayscale, 8-bit color) are described and a table of typical aerial photo scales as they translate to pixel resolutions and file sizes is included.

This unit presents (1) a case study and (2) a bibliographic resource for GIS in the medical field. The case study illustrates the use of a GIS to monitor and analyze spatial patterns of physicians' multiple locations. This case highlights data location, acquisition and assessment, join and relational operators, geocoding and distance calculations, and standard query language.