Description:
| Aims: Students to be able to:
* Discuss the principles of Geographic Information science and its relationship to applied Geographic Information Systems (GIS);
* Understand how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be used to study and solve problems in transportation, environment, local government and business;
* Demonstrate their understanding of the application of GIS to applied problem solving by developing a GIS to meet an identified need in business, science or public policy making.
Learning Outcomes: On completion of the unit the student should be able to:
* Define the nature of geographic information and the type of decisions that make use of such information;
* Discuss the problems and techniques of representation, (including generalisation, discrete and continuous fields, georeferencing and uncertainty of data);
* Develop a GIS to meet an identified need, using suitable software, appropriate data modelling and data collection techniques;
* Perform appropriate geovisualization, query, measurement and transformation and inference to the GIS they have developed;
* Discuss issues of maintaining the currency of large scale geographic databases;
* Evaluate a geographical information system including fitness for purpose and data integrity issues that may affect the validity of the model and reduce dependency on the outcomes.
Skills: * Academic skills - Research, analyse, compare and contrast, apply, evaluate. (Taught and Assessed).
* Practical skills - GIS programming skills, development skills, programming and SQL design skills, coding skills, management skills. (Taught and Assessed).
* Personal skills - time management, personal organisation, problem solving, and research. (Taught and Assessed).
* Communication skills - demonstrations, working with an employer. (Taught and Assessed).
Content: * Problems of representation by abstraction and generalisation that are required to produce maps and useful spatial data sets;
* Principles of uncertainty with respect to GIS;
* Identify and use appropriate data representations; raster, vector, georeferencing;
* Explain the limitations of data collection techniques;
* Develop a GIS. Identifying system requirements, developing a GIS application to meet the identified need, applying geo-referencing within the application and implement the design and populate it with data;
* Spatial Analysis using the geographical information system by generating relevant hypotheses and applying these hypotheses to support decisions.
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