Spatial Planning with GIS

Geographic information systems (GIS) are nowadays indispensable tools for virtually all modern professions including planning to acquire, manage, analyze, synthesize, and present geographic data, i.e., data pertaining to the surface of the Earth. The major objective of this course is to take casual users of GIS to the next level at which they can communicate how geographic data are represented and processed in GIS to non-experts and select appropriate spatial analytic tools to answer questions/solve problems in students’ chosen contexts.

On the completion of this course, students should be able to:

• describe a GIS in terms both of its components and of its functions
• explain how spatial data are structured (in vector, raster, or network representation) and what operations are applicable to them
• explain how attribute data are measured (in terms of nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio scales) and what operations are applicable to them
• design how to combine elementary GIS operations for specific tasks and execute them in manual and/or (semi-)automated manners
• conduct raster-based land (use) analysis involving multiple criteria
• conduct network-based path and location analysis
• conduct elementary point pattern analysis