Training on Remote Sensing and Geographic Information

System for Groundwater Potential Mapping

Geo-information Science (GIS)

An overview of fundamentals

Tadele Dagne February 2022 Adama| Ethiopia

Let us introduce

My name is Tadele Dagne

Remote Sensing and GIS Expert
DH Consult – www.dh-consult.com
Mobile – 09-10-05-03-63
Email – tadelegeol@gmail.com
Website – www.geo.et

--
Background
1st degree – Geology
2nd degree – Applied remote sensing for Earth Sciences 2
3 You have been already dealing with some portion of geology and
hydrogeology yesterday

So, what about the next 3 days

- GIS
- Remote sensing
Training Timeline
4 Geology – Hydrogeology GIS - RS
Review of concepts and principles Concepts, exercise

. 14 15 16 17
14 Feb 2022- CONCEPTS AND TOOLS
GIS, RS, data
WEIGHTING, ANALYSIS
AHP, GIS

18 Feb 2022

5 days plan Your

time
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GEOPHYSICS
Electrical, Magnetic
Main learning outcome
Understanding what GI science is
- Think spatially: when and how to use certain operation/tool
- It is not merely about learning how to use GIS software!

RS principles & image processing

So, what are you going to do in 3 days – approach

- First attend the lecture
- them go for exercise
Lectures and exercises are related in most cases. 5
Reference materials

Lecture slides
Exercise manuals
Exercise datasets
Books
Links

Try to read them to grasp upmost information during the sessions and after.

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Core books

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 Structure of the presentation
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• What is . . . ?
• Geographic phenomena: Objects – Fields, Discrete – Continuous

• General issues:
- Data values
- Boundaries
- Scale and resolution

• Computer Representations
- Regular and Irregular Tessellation (Quadtree)
- Triangulation
- Points, lines, polygons
What is . . . ?

GIS // Geographic Information Systems

… is a set of tools that captures, stores, analyses, manages, and presents

data that are linked to location(s).

GI Science // Geographic Information Science

… is the basic research field that seeks to redefine geographic concepts and
their use in the context of geographic information systems.

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 What is a model ?

• To model: ‘to describe’ or ‘to represent’

• A model: schematization of reality

• Model: A model is an object or concept that is used to represent something

else.

• It is reality scaled down and converted to a form we can comprehend

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 What is a model ?

“A model is a manageable, comprehensible and schematic

representation of a piece of reality”

• “reality” – no hypothetical system

• “a piece of reality” – limited domain in time and space
• “schematic representation” – from a specific point of view
• “representation” - an infinite number of projections
• “a comprehensible representation” - a model serves a specific goal
• “a manageable representation” - it should give the user the results they need

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 Modelling in GIS - Characteristics

• Most familiar is the map

• A collection of stored data representing real-
world phenomena

What is the “topic” to be modelled? – geologic

▪ What are the important phenomena?

Lithology , Structure
Water body
Akaki Beseka; 1:250K
etc ..
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 Modelling in GIS - Characteristics
What is the spatial scale ?

Akaki Beseka; 1:250K Akaki Beseka; 1:2M after generalization

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 Structure of the presentation

• What is . . . ?
• Geographic phenomena: Objects – Fields, Discrete – Continuous

• General issues:
- Data values
- Boundaries
- Scale and resolution

• Computer Representations
- Regular and Irregular Tessellation (Quadtree)
- Triangulation
- Points, lines, polygons
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 What is a geographic phenomena ?
A geographic phenomenon is a manifestation of an entity or process of
interest that:

→ Can be named or described

→ Can be geo-referenced
→ Can be assigned a time interval at which it is/was present

Not all relevant information about phenomena has the form of a triplet:
o No name (un-described object)
o No geo-reference (legal document)
o No time (phenomenon that exists permanently)
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 Type of geographic phenomena – Object or field

1. A (geographic) field is a geographic phenomenon for which, for every point in the
study area, a value can be determined

1. A (geographic) object is a geographic phenomenon that does not cover the total
study area, the space in between objects is potentially empty or undetermined

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Type of geographic phenomena – Object or field

• Lithology ----- ?
• Buildings ------- ?

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 Type of geographic phenomena - Discrete or continuous

Continuous field

• A field is a geographic phenomenon that has

a value ‘everywhere’ in the area.

f (x, y)

f stands for the value of the field at location (x,y)

All changes in field values are gradual

The change is smooth
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 Type of geographic phenomena - Discrete or continuous

Discrete field

• cut up the space in subparts with a clear boundary,

with all locations in one part having the same value

• Typical examples are

- land classifications,
- geological classes,
- soil types

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Type of geographic phenomena

Lithology 20
What type of geographic phenomenon is this? – Borehole
a. Object
b. Discrete Field
c. Continuous Field

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 Structure of the presentation

• What is . . . ?
• Geographic phenomena: Objects – Fields, Discrete – Continuous

• General issues:
- Data values
- Boundaries
- Scale and resolution

• Computer Representations
- Regular and Irregular Tessellation (Quadtree)
- Triangulation
- Points, lines, polygons
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 Data types & values

Different types of values that we can use to represent “phenomena”.

Four different data values:

≈ Nominal data
≈ Ordinal data
≈ Interval data
≈ Ratio data

Nominal and Ordinal data together are often referred to as ‘qualitative’ data,

Interval and Ratio are known as ‘quantitative’ data

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 Data types & values

• Nominal data values, are values that provide a name or identifier (names of geological
units). This type of data is also called categorical.

• Ordinal data values, are values that can be put in a natural sequence but do not allow
any other type of computation (low, medium, high).

• Interval data values, are quantitative, allow simple forms of computation like addition
and subtraction, however, interval data has no arithmetic zero value (temperature)

• Ratio data values, allow most, if not all, forms of arithmetic computation and have a
natural zero value (distance)
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 Boundaries

Both objects and discrete fields have boundaries

Two different types of boundaries:

- Crisp boundaries
- Fuzzy boundaries

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 Boundaries

• A crisp boundary is one that can be determined at an almost arbitrary level

of precision, dependent only on the data-acquisition technique applied.

• Fuzzy boundary is not an exact line but rather an area of transition.

• Crisp boundaries are more common in man-made phenomena, whereas

fuzzy boundaries are more common in natural phenomena.

• In many cases boundaries that are fuzzy in reality (like geological classes)
are represented in a GIS as crisp boundaries.
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 Scale and resolution

Map scale can be defined as the ratio between distance on a paper map and
distance of the same stretch in the terrain.
Resolution for a digital map is the cell width of the tessellation applied
Digital data, as stored in a GIS are essentially without scale.

1:50,000 > 1 cm on map = 50,000 cm in reality

1 cm on map = 500 meters in reality

Large-scale > ratio is large

1:1000 (more detail)
Small-scale > ratio is small
1:2500000 (Less detail)
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 Structure of the presentation

• What is . . . ?
• Geographic phenomena: Objects – Fields, Discrete – Continuous

• General issues:
- Data values
- Boundaries
- Scale and resolution

• Computer Representations
- Regular and Irregular Tessellation (Quadtree)
- Triangulation
- Points, lines, polygons
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 Computer representations – continuous surface

Various geographic phenomena have the characteristics

of continuous functions in space.

To represent these phenomena, we can either:

• Store as many observation pairs as possible (for

example elevation)

• Try to find a symbolic representation of the

elevation field function – that can be evaluated to
give us the elevation at any given location (x,y)

Option 2: find a symbolic representation 29

Computer representations – continuous surface

Spatial autocorrelation: locations that are close are

more likely to have similar values than locations that
are far apart. (Tobler’s first law of Geography)

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 Computer representations – Regular tesselations

A tessellation is a partitioning of space into mutually exclusive

cells that together make up the complete area.

The cells are of the same shape and size, and the field
attribute value assigned to a cell is associated with the entire
area occupied by the cell

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 Regular tessellations – raster versus grid

A raster is a set of regularly spaced cells with associated

values.
• The associated values represent cell values, not point
values.
• This means that the value for a cell is assumed to be
valid for all locations within the cell.

A grid is a collection of regularly spaced field values (points)

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Regular tessellations – cell boundary

Some convention is needed to state

which value prevails on cell boundaries

Lower and left boundaries belong

to the cell.

Continuity gap <> cell size <> storage

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Regular tessellations

Advantages:

• We know how they partition space. This leads to fast algorithms.

Disadvantages:

• They do not adapt to the spatial phenomenon we want to represent.

• Cell boundaries are both artificial and fixed: they may or may not coincide
with the boundaries of the phenomenon of interest.

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 Irregular tessellation

Irregular tessellations are again partitions of

space into mutually exclusive cells, but now the
cells vary in size and shape, allowing them to
adapt to the spatial phenomena they represent.

One example: region Quadtree

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 Irregular tessellation

region Quadtree - It splits up the area into four quadrants.

- This procedure stops when all the cells in a quadrant have the same field value.
- Adaptive

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 Vector representations

• Raster's do not explicitly store geo-references of the

phenomena. They provide a geo-reference of the lower
left corner and the resolution.

• The geo-reference of all other cells can be derived

from this information.

• In vector representations a geo-reference is explicitly

associate with the geographic phenomena.
• A geo-reference is a coordinate pair from some
geographic space, also known as a vector

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Vector representations – Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN)

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Vector representations – Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN)

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Vector representations – Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN)

A plane fitted through the anchor points has a

fixed aspect and gradient.

Slope consists of two parts gradient and aspect.

Slope can be used to compute an approximation

of elevation of other locations.

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Vector representations – Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN)

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Does TIN belong to vector?

• Yes, each anchor point has a stored

geo-reference.

• No, as the chosen triangulation

provides a tiling of the entire study
space.

However, the cells of the tiling do not

have an associated stored value as
is typical of tessellations.

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Vector representations - Point & line

• Points are defined as single coordinate pairs (x,y) when we work

in 2D or coordinate triplets (x,y,z) when we work in 3D
• Points are used to represent objects, that are shape- and size
less (zero dimensional)

• Line used to represent one dimensional objects (roads, rivers…)

• Line is defined by 2 end nodes and 0-n internal nodes.

• An internal node or vertex is like a point that only serves to
define the line

• Many GISs store a line as a sequence of coordinates of its end

nodes and vertices, assuming that all its line segments are
straight.

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 Vector representations - Point & line

• By increasing the number of internal vertices,

we can improve the shape

• Number of vertices determines the precision.

• Scale is related to the spatial accuracy –

lower number of internal vertices – coarse
scale – generalization.

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 Vector representations - area

• When area objects are stored using a vector approach,

the usual technique is to apply a boundary model.

• This means that each area feature is represented by

some arc/node structure that determines a polygon as
the area’s boundary.

• Area features of the same type are stored in a single

data layer, represented by mutually nonoverlapping
polygons.

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Vector representations - area

• A simple but naïve representation of area features

would be to list for each polygon the list of lines that
describes its boundary.

This is called a polygon-by-polygon representation.

• Each line in the list would be a sequence that starts

with a node and ends with one.

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Vector representations - area

• The reason why this is not a good representation is

called data redundancy.

• This means that shared boundaries between polygons

are stored double.

• Another disadvantage of such a polygon-by-polygon

representation is that if we want to identify the polygons
that border each other – this is a difficult search
analysis.

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representations of geographic fields

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representations of geographic fields

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representations of objects

• Line and point objects are more

awkward to represent using rasters,
as rasters are area based.

• Objects are more naturally

represented in vector

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• What is a model?
• Geographic phenomena:
- Objects – Fields,
- Discrete – Continuous
• General issues:
- Data values (Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, Ration)
- Boundaries (Fuzzy, Crisp)
- Scale and resolution
• Computer Representations
- Regular and Irregular Tessellation (Quadtree)
- Triangulation (TIN)
- Points, lines, polygons
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Key concepts

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