National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

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 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.

This unit discusses the three major methods of communicating about and distributing GIS products: advertising, presenting demonstrations and providing training and support. It explains the basic advertising principals of AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action) and lists common questions to address when planning a marketing campaign, product demonstration, trade show exhibition or training and support.

This unit describes the process of address matching, which allows the GIS user to convert postal addresses and/or zip codes to geographic coordinates. Example applications from the medical field, government, marketing and distribution are given, along with practical examples with step-by-step instructions.

This unit presents an overview of common GIS data formats, computer systems, spatial data handling software programs and scripting languages. Two step-by-step examples are given: (1) converting a text file of point locations to an Arc/Info point coverage; and (2) rounding floating-point data to integer values.

This unit outlines the procedures involved in digitizing, the potential errors that may occur and the ways of correcting them, as well as a working knowledge of digitizing terminology. It describes pre-digitizing tasks such as map preparation and registration, digitizing in each of the two modes and error detection and elimination.

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 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 describes various approaches to database validation—the process of determining of database values are reasonably accurate, complete and logically consistent. Through example applications involving plant and animal species distribution databases it details methods for evaluating logical cartographic consistency, logical attribute consistency, statistical tests and logical query of the data, ground truthing and sensitivity analysis.

This unit describes the map scanning process with attention to map preparation, scale and accuracy, image types, file considerations, spatial resolution as it relates to map scale, hardware, and post-processing considerations. Image enhancement techniques such as contrast and brightness adjustment and gamma correction are noted.