A basic introduction to GIS concepts

by Skyler Sorsby

“So, what on earth is a GIS?” I muttered to myself as I pored through a college

archaeology textbook. In the chapter I was reading, the subject turned to discuss how
remote-sensing techniques minimized the human impact on ancient historical sites. GIS
was referenced as a modern way of cataloging and analyzing field data. The figure
illustrating this point was rather ambiguous.
It showed a series of small, black points
overlying a glaringly-blank white
background. “If this is what GIS (whatever it
is) does, then forget that!” I thought. Later
that year, I took an intro to GIS class. There,
I learned that GIS stood for “Geographic
Information System”, and that it was a type
of computer software able to process and
calculate any kind of spatial task you could
think up—you just had to know how to use it.

Leaving the class with a still vague

impression of the capability of GIS, I soon
stumbled (rather purposefully) into some
A bunch of dots on a page—is this all there is? student research. This research required me
to use ArcGIS (the industry standard)
beyond its face value. I had a set of problems that could not be solved by point-and-
click tools or simple map overlays. That’s when I started to get the hang of it. This
document is meant as a qualitative primer to help you understand a) what in the heck a
GIS is, b) what basic data types are, and c) that geoprocessing is so much more than
overlaying data on maps.

I. Important terms demystified:

When I first began to look at GIS my Junior year, I heard the terms “raster” and “vector”
tossed around. I noticed that GIS-users tend to have a separate vocabulary for GIS
stuff; learning the lingo to get in-the-know proved difficult. I wished that someone would
just speak plainly, in non-technical jargon. Here’s my pitch:

GIS is a type of cartography software. Rasters and vectors are the two data types that
you can make /process/display in a GIS. They are both spatial data—they describe
attributes that have a distance relationship in the real world. Both have their uses, so I’ll
talk about their respective potentials later.

II. Raster data:

Raster data is a grid of numeric information, with each cell containing a number. You
zoom out, and things look crisp. You zoom in too far, and you can see the pixels larger
than life. You’re probably already familiar with a popular type of raster: the photograph.
It sure is annoying to blow up your awesome shot of a sunrise for a poster, only to find
out that the enlarged image is grainy and pixelated. Each cell in this raster has a
numeric value, in this case coded by the colors of your sunrise. Rasters store numbers
in a grid, and that grid has a set, limited resolution.

Air photos are a great resource in a GIS. GIS programs display air photos in their exact
location on earth. This means that maps you create with
these photos will have real geographic coordinates. Of
course, there are many other types of rasters. Another
popular and extremely useful raster is the DEM: “Digital
Elevation Model”. These come in all shapes and sizes,
and, instead of brightness or color (as in air photos), they
contain elevation values for each pixel. This is extremely
handy for performing an untold number of topographic
analyses. However, there’s something you should know
about DEMs first. As with other rasters, each DEM has a
set grid resolution. Very coarse DEMs derived from
Synthetic Aparture Radar (SAR) from the Shuttle Radar
Topography Mission (SRTM) may have grid squares that
are 90 meters by 90 meters for each elevation value!
Conversely, new high-resolution DEMs derived from
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scans may have
grid squares as fine as 1 or even 0.5 meters. Depending
on what you want to use it for, coarse or fine resolutions
can make a big
difference. When you
If you “zoom in” far enough on a
obtain your DEM, it will raster, you’ll see that the whole
come in a certain file thing is made of grid squares.
format (recognizable
by the GIS), and a 3 arc-seconds 90 meters
certain resolution. 1 arc-second 30 meters
1/3 arc-seconds 10 meters
The naming system for 1/9 arc-seconds 1 meter
DEM resolutions
originally threw me for a loop—I saw labels in terms of
meters and arc-seconds. What the heck! When you
use a DEM of a certain resolution, say a 10-meter
DEM, the “10-meters” tells you that each grid square in
the DEM has a width and length of 10-meters in the
real world. In a 1/3 arc-second DEM, the “1/3 arc-
second” tells you that each grid square in the DEM has
a width and length of 1/3 of an arc-second of
An elevation raster still “zooms” in longitude/latitude. 1/3 of an arc-second ~ 10 meters,
to grid squares. incidentally.
Knowing your resolution will be important when you process your DEM. Smaller
resolutions display better and allow more detailed calculations, but coarser resolutions
let you generalize over a much larger area.

III. Vector data:

Remember that raster data is a grid of set resolution—you can “zoom in” and
eventually you’ll see larger and larger squares of different values. Not so with vector
data! Each part of a vector is defined by an equation that describes its exact location.
The resolution is not set—you zoom in, and you still see a crisp object. However, each
vector object can only store one value, or a set of values, uniform over its entire extent.
This means that vector data represents a simplified version of reality, but one that is
easier to deal with in some ways. Each vector is made up of one of three types: points,
lines, or areas. You may use points to show (as my archaeology textbook did) the exact
location of objects. You could use lines to map one dimensional features, or areas to
map the second dimension. And if you zoom in or out, the same crisp edges are still
present. All data you receive and import into a GIS will be of one of these two types.

A vector area

No matter how far you “zoom in” on a vector, it’s still crisp. It’s an idealized shape governed by equations.

IV. Projections:
Since GIS data is, by default, spatial data, each piece has a real geographic location (it’s
“geo-referenced”). However, the real life version of your collected data resides upon a
globe—you can’t just show it on a flat screen de facto. The data need a map projection.
To enable such a display, you need to
investigate your data’s metadata: the
accompanying description that
summarizes important attributes, like
resolution, collection methods, projection
type, etc. If you import data of a particular
projection type into a GIS map of a
different projection, the results will be
skewed. Always know your projection
type! Most GIS systems allow you to re-project your coordinate system to a different one,
once your data is imported. Projections come in two types: Latitude/Longitude or
Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM). Special rules govern the display (or ‘projection’) of your
Lat/Long shows distances in degrees; 3d data on a warped 2d surface (courtesy of the USGS
‘Projections’ tutorial.
UTM shows distances in meters. UTM is
the preferred projection type for
geospatial analyses. ESRI has a nice intro guide to map projections here:

http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//003r00000001000000

When you make a new project in your GIS of choice, make sure that its projection
matches that of the data you wish to use. There should be a ‘settings’ menu, or
something similar, to check in. Wherever you obtained your data from should also
provide metadata.

If you are working with data of two different projections, your GIS may have the
capability to translate between the two, or reproject into the right type. As far as I’m
aware, most expensive GIS programs have this functionality built in. GRASS GIS is one
of the only open-source programs that does.

V. File types
Both vectors and rasters come in different kinds of file formats, so it’s to be familiar with
them:

Three common raster types:

File type Extension

ASCII grid format .ascii or .grd
GeoTIFF .tif
Arc/Info Binary Grid .adf

Two common vector types:

File type Extensioin

ESRI shapefile .shp
Keyhole Markup Language .kml

The main idea is, every piece of cartographic data has, or should have, a projection.
There are hundreds of different types. The part you have to concern yourself with,
though, is looking at metadata to figure which projection your data is in. If you have
multiple data items in different projections, use GIS to translate them all into just one.

Likewise, there are many file formats for both rasters and vectors. All you need to know
is that each type you’re likely to run into is valid, you just need to have the presence of
mind to look up the specs and figure out exactly what it is. Then you can follow the
standard import procedure for whatever GIS you’re using.
VI. Geoprocessing
If a) you know the data file type, b) have imported the data into a GIS, c) have made
sure all the data is in the same projection, you’re ready to analyze. I’ll be vague, here,
as there are hundreds of different things you can do to process your data and solve
problems. When I took my first GIS class, I mostly thought that GIS was just a fancy
overlay tool, to take different maps and pictures and combine them into a bigger map or
picture—something to look at and see where things wound up. Geoprocessing is much,
much more than this.

How much? How close? How high? These are questions that may be answered by
geoprocessing. You can tell a GIS to look at all the nesting sites of various birds
(represented by points) within a wildlife preserve (a polygon), and have it determine the
number occupied by each type of bird. You can model watersheds and their drainage
systems, look at stream profiles, and estimate the erosion potential for a downstream
locale. You can find out how much of what type of vegetation is within 500 feet of a
certain stream. You can figure out how far apart two different businesses are, and what
the fastest way to get from one to the other is (Google Maps is a good GIS application
of this type of problem). Where do Macintosh computer users generally live in the U.S.?
What state has the highest population density that voted for a certain presidential
candidate? Here are some commonly used tools:

Vector
Bufffer: Generate a radius of a certain length around the entire perimeter of an object.
Clip: trim a vector based on the extent of a mask (another vector or raster).
Digitize: Make new objects (aka digital mapping)
Near: Calculate distance to specified objects.
Intersect: Take only the portion of an object that overlies another object.
Union: Merge two objects.

Raster
Calculate slope maps and other landscape parameters
Derive stream channels (plus slope, sinuosity, etc)
Generate contours
Identify watershed basins
Interpolate surfaces
Perform zonal statistics
Raster algebra

GIS becomes quite handy once you can abstract these and other tools to help you with
your task. For example, I’ll run a watershed extraction routine to get a map of streams,
use a conversion tool to change the raster into a network of vector lines, use the
digitizer to manually trim the network to just the channel I want, generate points along
that specific line, and query underlying raster maps to get elevation, distance, and
drainage area at regular intervals along my stream. Bring some problems to the table,
and you’ll quickly learn how to use the tools to address them in GIS.
VII. Useful websites:

GIS 4 Geomorphology is a good one for learning how and what you can do in GIS:
http://gis4geomorphology.com/

Here’s my humble site (more how-to’s):

https://sites.google.com/site/sorsbysj/home

GRASS GIS’s applications page:

http://grass.osgeo.org/documentation/applications/

ESRI’s list of industries that use Arc GIS:

http://www.esri.com/industries

VIII. Conclusion:
Hopefully, you now have a basic understanding of what a GIS is and the difference
between a raster and a vector. Know that there are many file types and projections, but
that they’re all defined and you can translate between them. You don’t have to know
how they were calculated or why they are the way they are. Finally, I hope that you
understand that GIS maps aren’t just pretty pictures—they’re actual data! You can make
quantitative analyses, not just qualitative, and there are many, many fields into which
you can apply geoprocessing. Happy mapping!