Geographic Data

Dr. Rohit Goyal

Reader, Civil Engineering
Malaviya National Institute of Technology
Jaipur
Topics Covered
 Components of Geographic data
 Spatial
 Attribute
 Data Vs Information
 Type of Spatial Data
 Point
 Line
 Polygon
 Type of Geographic Data
 Discreet
 Continuous
 Summarized by Area
 Time and GIS

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 Geographic Data
 Geographic data are the raw materials from which
geographic information systems (GIS) users create
the information needed to make decisions.
 Geographic data are diverse, but most geographic
data have a few things in common.
 All are produced by measuring, in one way or another, the
locations and characteristics of entities in the real world.
 All record locations in ways that take the Earth's complex
shape into account.
 All are imperfect, since it is impractical to capture all of
the infinite detail of the real world.
 And all geographic data need to be compatible with other
kinds geographic data so that they can be combined to
address complex problems.

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Components of Geographic Data
 Geographic Data is crucial to any
implementation of GIS.
 This data must be properly organized
(structured) in digital format so as to store
and manage the same.
 GIS data has two fundamental components
• Spatial component (which describe the location of
data)
• Attribute component (which describes properties
of data in which we are interested)

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Examples
 Spatial data about various cities in our study
area may be recorded in terms of their latitude
and longitude, or (X,Y) with known origin.
 Attribute data in one application may be for
example
 Population (Integral value)
 Year of its establishment (Date/Time)
 Wholesale Price Index (Floating point number)
 Founder’s Name (String) etc.
 In another application, attributes could be
 Daily mean/max/min temperature
 Daily rainfall etc. depending upon the applications of
GIS.

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Data Vs Information
 Data is typically used as both singular
and plural form
 Single data means 1 observation
 Plural data means series of observations
 Information is the meaning or
interpretation of data.
 Information is usually obtained by
analyzing the data (usually plural data).

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Example
 Example, we may have “Data” about all accident sites in
the Jaipur city in last 10 years
 If suppose we plot these locations and identify areas
where more accidents have occurred, this is
information.
 We can now further study these areas as high risk
zones.
 This information has given insight to us to take
corrective measures (plan) to reduce accidents in Jaipur
city.
 In a M.Tech. study, by Ashish Dhamaniya, published in
journal of GIS Development, it was concluded that the
accidents occurred near the road intersections specially
‘T’ intersections. At such locations speed of the vehicles
are usually not in the IRC limits.

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Thematic Map based upon the
Travel Speed of Four Wheelers 8
Spatial Data
 Spatial data occupies geographic space.
 Mappable Data
 Spatial entities may have other
characteristics associated with it
 Non-spatial data
 Known as attributes
 Combined spatial data and associated
non-spatial data are termed as
“Geographic Data”.

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Type of Spatial Data
 Three main types
 Points
 Line
 Polygon
 Some GIS also mention “annotation” as
another type of entity which could be placed
on GIS drawn maps.
 However “annotation” is not a spatial data (it
is not attached to a specific location although
it may be linked to a spatial entity and usually
identifies that entity).

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Points
 A point is a spot attached to specific location
that has no physical dimensions.
 On map, points are usually shown as symbols
(which could be large symbol but does not
indicate dimensions).
 Points generally designate features that are too
small to show properly at the given scale.
 They could also indicate events such as location
of accident etc.
 It is important to understand that on a very
small scale country map, Jaipur city may be
shown as a dot but on Jaipur district map it is a
polygon and on Jaipur city map, it occupies
almost all the space.
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Lines
 A line is a one dimensional feature having only
length, a beginning and an end.
 It does not have width.
 Line are linear features either real (roads,
streams, canals) or artificial (administrative
boundary, migration path of animals).
 Lines can be shown in different width, color
and type (solid, dash-dash, dash-dot).
 Different GIS can create lines as series of
points (closely spaced points where curvature
is sharp) or as combination of series of points,
arcs, bézier curve etc.
 End points are usually termed as nodes
 Intermediate points are termed as vertexes.
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Bézier Curve
 Bézier curves need only a few points to
define a large number of shapes.
 So they are useful over other mathematical
methods for approximating a given shape.
 Bézier curves have
 Anchor points
 Handles
 We can move the handles to create
many different shapes, while the anchor
points remain stationary.
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Polygons
 A polygon is an enclosed area.
 Polygons have two spatial properties, i.e. area and
perimeter.
 Boundary of polygon may comprise of many line
segments, which are interconnected to form closed
space.
 A polygon usually shares it’s boundary with many
adjacent polygons.
• Such common boundary must be digitized only once
and reused when forming adjacent polygon, because
however carefully you may try to redraw a boundary,
they may not match perfectly.
• Also you may not be able to perform some advanced
analysis which depend upon common boundary
between adjacent polygons.

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Polygons Display Properties
 Polygons can be filled in different hatching
patterns such as

 Hatching or solid fill could also be in different

colors to show different classes.
 Their boundaries could also be shown in
different styles just like lines.
 Some advance GIS software allow fancy fills
such as texture, gradient etc.
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GIS Themes
 Usually one theme comprise of similar
types of entities: points, lines or
polygons
 However present day GIS also allow
complex type of themes where different
entities could be of different types
 For example, streams in hilly region may be
shown as line, which becomes polygon in
the plains as they occupy considerable
width.
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Type of Geographic Features
 Geographic Features are either
 Discreet
 Continuous
 Summarized by area
 Discreet features exists only at discreet locations and
does not exists in between two locations.
 Examples: houses, cities, rivers etc.
 Continuous phenomena can be measured or found
anywhere.
 Examples: temperature, ground level, water table depth,
average annual rainfall
 Summarized data represents the counts or density of
individual features within area boundaries.
 Examples: Number of Accidents (zone wise), demographic
details, density of population etc.

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Discreet Features
 Discreet feature’s actual location can be
pinpointed.
 At any given spot, the feature is either
present or not.
 Discreet feature could be
 Points: wells, cities
 Lines: roads, streams
 Polygons: land parcels, zonal boundaries

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Discreet Features
Points

Lines

Polygons
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Continuous Phenomena
 Continuous phenomena are usually measured
at discreet points but its value exists for all
intermediate points as well.
 A gradual transition takes place between a
point to nearby point.
 Interpolation techniques could be utilized to
estimate the value of phenomena at any
intermediate point. There are many
interpolation techniques
 Linear
 Inverse Distance Weighted
 Natural Neighbor
 Kriging etc.

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Continuous Phenomena
Elevation

Average Annual Precipitation

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Summarized by Area

A feature, Density of feature,

represented by dots zone wise

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Representation of Data
 Some data may be considered as either discreet or continuous
depending upon the project.
 Elevation can be shown in uniform profiles or in discreet elevational
units (stair steps).

Vs

 Traffic speed on 8th slide is shown as continuous data though it is not

(road does not exist everywhere). However it may help us find
patterns.
 As an alternative, we could have divided out study areas in zones and
digitized them as polygons and them given different colors to polygons
based on average traffic speed (discreet representation).
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Time and GIS
 Time is important data quality element that can be
critical descriptive characteristic of spatial data
 It can be used to express dynamic phenomena, trends,
changes etc.
 Most of the data has life-time, beyond which it is no
more valid and new data must be collected
 However we may require old data to map changes and find
trends.
 Public Water Supply Organization should update its
customer data on continuous basis
 Ground water levels are usually collected every monthly
or pre-monsoon and post monsoon only.
 Census data is collected every 10 years.
 Geologic data normally has long life.

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Mapping Change
 Many modern GIS allows us to easily
keep track of history of data for
mapping changes.
 Depending upon our requirement and
phenomena, we have to decide about
frequency of data collection, which may
vary from hourly, daily, monthly to
centuries.
 Remote Sensing data is available at
regular interval and so allows us to map
changes.
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