Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Software: An Open Source Lecture #GIS #Maps

hello everyone in this video I'll give you an introduction to geographic information systems or GIS software concepts if you're a GIS software beginner this video is for you put plainly geographic information systems or GIS is amazing in this video I will show you a GIS software is and what it can and cannot do topics I will discuss will include spatial data and asset management data querying and table joining spatial analysis GIS programming and application programming interfaces or api's spatial modeling cartography and map production animation and three-dimensional or 3d spatial data mobile GIS field data collection and I'll also talk about some of the limitations of GIS I'll also give you a demonstration of GIS software to show you what GIS software looks like in practice throughout the entire video I'll use a free and open source software package so you can get started right away using GIS links to the software and datasets I use are available in the descriptions below if you enjoy this video please hit the like button share this video or subscribing to this channel ok let's go learn about what GIS is hello and welcome to this introduction to geographic information systems or GIS software the learning objectives for this lecture are to understand the parts of the system that comprises GIS software understand the concept of layers in GIS identify common GIS functions that include spatial data and asset management storage formats imagery databases data querying table joining spatial analysis GIS programming and application programming interfaces or api's spatial modeling cartography and map production animation three-dimensional geographic information or 3d and mobile GIS and field data collection you'll also learn how to understand some of the limitations of GIS to understand what a GIS is let's first take a closer look at what the acronym means remove the G from GIS and you have is or an information system information systems have been defined as combinations of hardware software data knowledge and people additionally like any system which is a whole constructed of parts a GIS can also be viewed an amalgam of several parts that create the overall system I'll next discuss each of these parts further let's take a look at each of the parts of GIS software that is used for running GIS operations for example open source GIS software packages such as QGIS that I will use for demonstration throughout this video hardware that is the platform in which software is run and or data is stored in today's increasingly interconnected world hardware can range from traditional PCs to smartphones to massive computing infrastructures for hosting cloud computing resources to drones for field data collection like seen in this picture people that work with GIS in a variety of capacities such as using GIS to make decisions like people living in refugee camps knowledge which is perhaps the most abstract part of GIS but is equally important as the other parts knowledge in the context of this discussion refers to the variety of training education skills and experiences that are applicable to GIS for example by watching this video you are gaining new knowledge of GIS data which will always be the most important component of a GIS and finally the network the network can be considered the element that connects all the other parts together for example the internet that connects people to GIS data websites or connecting GIS software with web-based data services or social networks that connect people who use GIS to one another through things like the GIS user communities or even the YouTube community the core power of GIS is in its ability to organize data into one common geographic view the key thing that gif provides to the organization of data geographically is the concept of map layers this figure shows a selection of real GIS data sets from Manhattan New York USA to demonstrate how map layers are combined using GIS for urban planning first we might have imagery which provides a visual reference to the geographic region in question a census tract layer that shows population thematic characteristics tax parcels as to who owns what buildings a road layer that provides reference to critical infrastructure a social media layer which represents locations of people who are tweeting about issues they might be facing in the city in the hospital's layer which provides reference for medical issues the concept of map layers itself is not a new idea as acetate map overlays existed for years before the advent of computers what makes modern GIS driven map layer so powerful is the ability to overlay any number of digital map layers together in reference to a common geography thus allowing for entities on the layers to be viewed and analyzed together with the interactive power that GIS offers as quickly changing map layers symbology of map layers or any other GIS function that I'll discuss later in this video GIS software contains many powerful tools that can serve numerous functions the following parts of this video discuss some important GIS functions as discussed previously data is the most important component with the overall system that is GIS the management of spatial data using GIS is thus a primary GIS function management of GIS can come in many forms for example GIS is often used to create spatially referenced data creation of spatial data can involve many activities such as digitizing features from images in this example features are being digitized from a historic map image a variety of construction tools such as points lines and polygons are being used to create features in three categories roads as lines houses as points and water as polygons once GIS data is created or while it is being created it must be stored in some type of data repository so that can later be queried retrieved disseminated and updated data repositories for GIS data are diverse as GIS data itself this image shows one of the most basic yet still commonly used GIS data storage formats a comma separated values or CSV file in this example place name features are stored in a CSV file CSV files are nothing more than an ascii based text file where data in the file is structured using commas to define data columns and each line in the file represents a single data record most often used for storing point features specific geographic information is often represented as decimal degree XY Cartesian coordinate numbers in the file that can then be parsed or read by GIS software for rendering on a map CSV files are a common data storage format used by GIS data providers such as the US Census Bureau and the United States Geological Survey additionally other characters such as a pipe or a tab can be used to structure text-based data like a CSV file in this video you're seeing an example of the specific files that comprise what is known as a shape file and what the contents of a shape file look like when displayed in G is using buildings in Mumbai India as an example a shape file is actually a collection of three or more files used for storing what is known as vector GIS data a shape file has become a de facto although not official spatial data standard for many years due to its widespread use in the GIS market and publication of datasets in shapefile format the shape file is still a widely used format and many GIS datasets published by entities around the world still use it that's why it's important to mention shapefile data can be viewed only using special GIS software unlike CSV files which can be viewed using a basic text file viewing program later in this video when I do a full demonstration of free and open source GIS software I'll show you more data stats from Mumbai India that you can download from my website imagery such as satellite or aerial imagery is commonly used as reference data in GIS here you are looking at what is known as bands of imagery or different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that have been stored as separate imagery files these bands are from what is known as Landsat imagery and are showing a wildfire in California USA these separate bands can be combined to create a single image that can display different colors like you see at the end of the video in the demonstration later in this video I'll show you how you can manipulate colors in different bands of remote sensing imagery with GIS to understand different aspects of geography using imagery this figure shows storage of GIS data in a relational database this is a very broad category of how GIS data is stored and entails keeping geographically referenced information inside structures that normally store other types of non geographic information storage of GIS data inside of relational databases is typically used in large-scale operations where there are massive volumes of GIS data that have complex modelling requirements and need to be shared with many people most professional-grade GIS technologies offer support for storing GIS data inside of relational databases such as Microsoft sequel server or open source GIS enterprise database environments like shown in this figure GIS is fundamentally driven by data querying is the basic idea of asking a question of a data set queries are a very common practice in data management in general and are not solely restricted to GIS applications understanding how to do queries in a geographic context is perhaps one of the most fundamental skills you can learn as you will then be able to ask questions of your data and get potential answers to help you solve problems decision making and conduct analysis in this example you're seeing a basic structured query language or SQL statement where records related to the states of India are being queried inside of a GIS environment GIS also provides its own set of what are known as spatial query operators that extend traditional SQL approaches to ask questions of data from spatial perspectives for example how geographic features spatially relate to one another such as intersecting touching and sharing segments like scene in this figure another important concept from database management that's incorporated into GIS and as a core function of any GIS software is the idea of table joining the basic idea behind table joining is where two tables have an attribute or join field in common that is used to combine the two tables into one table in this example you see a table containing polygons of land types that is being joined with another table that provides descriptions of those land types analysis refers to the use of GIS to investigate geographically or spatially oriented questions or problems an important point in this regard too is that GIS software contains methods or tools designed to understand spatial patterns or processes in this example you see the results of an analysis that was done on 3-1-1 call records related to Hurricane Harvey in Houston Texas USA in 2017 in particular an analytical technique called kernel density estimation was run to create heat maps that identify where the most frequent amount of calls related to the disaster were occurring GIS programming refers to the use of computer programming languages to build custom software applications or tools to accomplish tasks that out-of-the-box GIS software might not be capable of accomplishing GIS programming thus evolved to become a more specialized task requiring interdisciplinary computing and information technology knowledge and skills such as computer programming that could be matched with GIS software tasks and principles GIS programming is still a highly valued skill knowledge of which which makes one very valuable in terms of employability a GIF programmer may write computer code for tasks ranging from batch data processing to automation to the development of modern day mapping mashups that use complex algorithms for integrating heterogeneous data sources to solve unique problems in this example an open source web mapping environment called leaflet j/s is shown that uses a computer programming language called JavaScript to create interactive web Maps this is a great example of using an application programming interface or API to create a custom web-based GIS application in this example you see the underlying JavaScript and HTML code that was used to create the web page previously shown Jia's programming however is applicable to a wide range of computing platforms and languages in this image you see an example of the Python computer programming language that is used for data analysis and other data automation tasks Python is a language that is used in both commercial and open source GIS environments GIS programming is also on the forefront of today's explosion in dealing with massive volumes of data that broadly fall under the label of data science machine learning and artificial intelligence in this image you see a screenshot of an open source tool called the jupiter notebook that is used for data science applications inside of the jupiter notebook are a few lines of python code that are written to a renderer map using the leaflet j/s api that you saw previously in this video GIS is also a very powerful tool for modeling what-if scenarios much like model trains and cars give us a scaled representation of a real-world entity modeling in the context of GIS is the idea of using GIS to simulate conditions in the real world for example a GIS based model could be developed to simulate possible storm surge conditions and outcome scenarios like scene in this figure another very powerful use of GIS modeling techniques is the modeling of transportation networks and scenarios related to logistics and transportation planning in this image you see the results of a transportation modeling analysis that is examining where electronic debris x' originating from disaster spots can be transported to recycling facilities within a certain distance of what are known as service areas of course one of the most basic functions that modern GIS software provides is the ability to visualize Geographic and make maps using the time-honored traditions of cartography this example shows the production of a final matte product designed to communicate the results of a natural disaster resilience model in Rwanda modern GIS tools offer a powerful suite of cartographic tools for making digital maps that offer endless opportunities for engaging in the art and science of cartography time in animation have long been a mainstay of gif software in particular animation is useful when done correctly to show dynamic processes such as change that occurs over space and time in this example a map has been animated to show the change in population of India from 1960 until 2018 note the use of different colors to show how the population increases the inclusion of timeless space can offer a fundamentally different way of thinking about how the analysis of geography as well as different forms of visual representation can go beyond traditional static Maps once reserved for very specialized software three-dimensional representations of geographic information are now mainstream and gif software the combination of three-dimensional representations combined with animation techniques such as fly throughs make for compelling visualizations that can realistically show geography and new and exciting ways given that GIS is fundamentally focused on mapping and representing where things are located in the real world field data collection via mobile GIS platforms is critical to Geographic data collection and maintenance in this image a student of mine is mapping a refugee camp in Rwanda using a common smartphone with a lightweight field mapping application that's easy to use and collect a wide variety of geographic information in the field free and open source GIS tools like open data kit or odk collect have become powerful technologies that allow for collecting and maintaining Geographic data using a wide variety of platforms such as tablet computers smartphones and field computers of course one of the most exciting developments in recent years for field data collection of geographic information is the advent of drones in this example you see a drone that is being used to collect geographic information about water temperature conditions as part of an environmental monitoring process the geographic information collected with this drone will be analyzed using GIS software finally it's important to consider the limitations of GIS technology in general is often seen as a miracle cure for existing problems but as important to manage the expectations about what GIS can do the following are some points to keep in mind in terms of the limitations of GIS GIS software is not a miracle technology that can automatically answer all questions although this may seem obvious it is important to keep in mind that GIS is limited by the numerous components of the system that comprises GIS as discussed previously for example the answers you get are only as good as the software use the quality of the data used in the software the skills of the people operating the software conducting the analysis or doing the modeling and producing the final maps GIS can strongly support answering questions but it is still human reasoning and critical thinking that must make final decisions over reliance and over expectation of the technology coupled with a lack of proper GIS education and training and lack of good human judgment reasoning and critical thinking can all lead to dire consequences the acquisition creation editing and curation of data is the most costly aspect of GIS anyone whose experience with GIS has most likely learned this lesson the hard way if you're new to GIS it is very important to understand the importance of data for being successful at utilizing GIS technology GIS operations analysis modeling and cartography are fundamentally data-driven acquiring G is ready data is costly both in terms of hours spent collecting and editing data or perhaps spending money on purchasing GIS data from a data vendor in my own teaching experiences I've seen many great student research project ideas fail or have to undergo major modifications due to a lack of data to support the investigation thus if you're new to GIS pay very close attention to how you will find data that can support your investigation and how much time and possibly money you're willing to spend to acquire data in this next part of the video I'll tie together many of the concepts you saw in the previous parts of this video doing a full demonstration of a free and open-source gif software package called QGIS I'll use Mumbai India as a case study for exploring some GIS data sets these datasets are available for you to use and can be downloaded using the link below in the video description hello everyone welcome to the demonstration part of the video what you're seeing here is the QGIS free and open source geographic information systems or GIS environment this is a very popular tool used around the world and like I said it's free and open source that means that you can download the program and use it for no charge and right now I don't have any data inside of QGIS so I first want to show you how you would add a base map and I'm gonna do that by clicking this button here and this will give me the OpenStreetMap OSM and I'm gonna choose osm standard if you've never heard of Open Street Map it's also one of the world's most popular free and open source data sources that are used in a lot of different projects and so forth so if you're looking for data for your GIS research project keep OpenStreetMap in mind as they have the whole entire world covered and they're very much in the spirit of free and open source data and they have a lot of integration with QGIS and I should mention that the way I was able to add Open Street Map into QGIS was using a plugin this is the quick map services plugin and if you want to see what other plugins are in QGIS you go to this menu manage and install plugins and you can see I have a couple of them installed the popular grass for raster analysis and so forth however you'll also see under not install there's tons of them and the reason I mention this is that qgis is a very powerful software on its own however sometimes you may find it doesn't do things that you need so take a look at the vast world of plugins that exist for the software as that's one of the benefits of being a free and open source software it has a very rich community of people that want to develop new plugins and software pieces for the software environment so with OpenStreetMap added to the map let's just go over some of the basics of using the software panning the map is this button here allows me to move around this is my zoom I'm gonna hold my left button down in Windows and drag a box and release it and that'll zoom me in and so forth and I'll show you some other the very basic tools in just a minute I should also mention that I'm using one particular version of QGIS so depending on when you're watching this video make sure that you have the newest version or perhaps just make adjustments between what you're seeing in this video for me and what your software environment does alright let's next go over the Mumbai India datasets that I've provided for you on my website and if I go over to my Windows Explorer directory you can see that I've downloaded the datasets and they're gonna come to you as a zip file and just to make sure everyone's clear on how to work with them once you download the zip file onto your computer I've put mine in an easy directory C temp I'm gonna use an unzipping tool I like to use 7-zip so I'm gonna right click 7-zip extract to Mumbai datasets and create a new folder and if you take a look at what's inside of that folder you'll see a lot of shape files that were talked about earlier in this video as one example these are all one shape file you can as I said earlier a shape file is a series of three or more files and I use shape files for this demonstration as they're widely available easy to use and they'll fit in a lot of different software environments as I will have other videos using commercial GIS software that I'll also utilize with these datasets I've also included what's called a geo TIF file that I'll talk about in a moment and that's some imagery of Mumbai from the Landsat 8 collection and I've also included a text file of place names that will also talk about now this is behind the scenes in Windows Explorer QGIS however has tools for adding these datasets right into your map and to access that tool I'm gonna go to this menu layer datasource manager and you can think of this as kind of like your Windows Explorer but for GIS data sets and as you can see here I have my file system and QGIS is very powerful in the numerous types of data formats that it can bring into its environment I didn't even get close to talking about most of these in my earlier video I did show you a screenshot actually of post GIS and so forth but there's a lot of possibilities out there but I'm going to use the file system I'm gonna go to C temp and here's my folder here that I just unzipped and if I expand that out I can see now representations of all my datasets as what are called vectors and some rasters and this can be a little confusing if you're new to GIS and so forth now let's just add some of these in to see what they look like let's start first with just a polygon that represents the boundary of the city of Mumbai so I'm going to click on that SHP or shape file and you add layer to project and when I do that if I go back over to my map and then i zoom in on Mumbai you can see this polygon now that's an outline of the city of Mumbai now notice right now it's sort of an orange colored fill so let me show you one of the really basic things that any GIS tool can do which is changing what's called the symbology or display of a given data layer so on mumbay boundary polygon I'm gonna right click go to properties and I'm gonna look for the symbology and from the fill I'm using a single symbol and I'll show differences in that just a minute single symbol I'm gonna make the fill color parent and I'll make the outline oh I don't know I'll make it read so when I do that now you can see this red line that's now transparent as I can see the OpenStreetMap base map behind it if I wanted to I could also make that red line a little thicker more visible see how it got thicker now repeat that process for some of my other datasets I have so again I'm gonna go to the data source manager under my C temp and I'll add these other ones in I'll add buildings land use natural areas places of worship railroads and roads and I use the ctrl key to make a multiple selection a very standard windows operation and I'll add all those layers into my map and as you can see right away the map gets a little busy with a lot of things but that's good because this is a very diverse group of data sets and this is where I encourage you to start exploring what's in here so if i zoom in a little closer you might remember this even from the demonstration of sheep files in general I did earlier in the video the buildings in Mumbai now another really common task that you can do in any GIS software is toggling of the layer visibility and all I have to do for that is the check box so if I were to go and uncheck Mumbai buildings notice how all of those brown polygons kind of disappeared and I'm seeing the underlying Open Street Map behind it and by the way all of this data that I'm using comes from Open Street Map and they're in a form of what's called vector GIS data and I have separate videos on that topic of what's called raster which are pixels or continuous surfaces of data or vector which are points lines and polygons so you can see that clearly here that these are basically the same data the OSM base map is basically an image or a raster and all this other data was extracted out of it as effector now let's take a look at some other things you can do with symbology let's take a look at the land-use I can right-click and do zoom to layer to kind of get an overview of what I'm looking at here and I see a lot of different kinds of land juice these they're currently green polygons on top of the map now let's look at another part of GIS that's essential it's called the attribute table and with this tool here the identify when I click on one of those polygons one of these green polygons I can find out things about what is in that polygon and that's the idea of the attribute table so every polygon which in this example represents a land-use has things called attributes or values tied with it and in this case there's a value called the F class or feature class and that's a meaning that's a recreational ground and if I continue with that idea the one I just clicked on that's now red is a cemetery that one is industrial and so forth now let's say I want to change my display so that all of those land use polygons are displaying based on the value of the F class or feature class and that's a really powerful aspect of GIS is incorporating basic you might call it qualitative cartographic representations so in order to do that I'm going to go over to Mumbai land use right click on it go to properties and this time instead of a single symbol I'm gonna go up here to categorized and the column I'm gonna pick is the F class and I'm going to click the classify button and what I'm going to get are all of the unique values that are found in the underlying attribute table of this particular data layer cemetery commercial farm and so forth what an apply notice now how my map has changed and if I expand this out I now have sort of a pseudo legend going showing what all the different land uses in Mumbai from the Mumbai land use layer are looking like and if I hit the Zoom Out button I can kind of see this a little bit more clearly now that we've seen how you can change the symbology of a data layer based on an attribute use let's take a closer look at the attribute table itself and show you some of the basic ideas of querying that were discussed earlier in the video if I were to go to the Mumbai land-use layer and right-click on it and select open attribute table I see the underlying table with all the records in the layer now if I wanted to do a basic query let's say for example I want to find all of the land-use values that are industrial perhaps I'm doing an environmental analysis of the city of Mumbai if I click on this button select features using the expression it brings up a dialog box similar to creating a where clause in an SQL statement if you're a technical person or basically just asking what particular attributes you want to find now the way you're gonna do this is I'm gonna look for a value where the F class is equal to industrial so I'll have to type that in so if I start typing the letter F C you can see it tries to help me out by filling in the name of the field or the column so I'm going to do F class is equal to and then I have to do because what's called a string a particular data type as opposed to a number I'll put a single quote and I'll type in the word industrial you okay now watch one I hit select features if I type this incorrectly we should see some of these records over here get highlighted and they did so with my expression that's a basic example of a query I want only the records in this layer where the f-class column is equal to the value of industrial I close this you can see up here I've selected 114 records and they're currently highlighted in yellow in my map to show which ones are the selected records next let's take a look at what's called a raster data set and I'm gonna add that to my map back using layer data source manager and that's what this M L n D sat 8 that stands for Mumbai Landsat 8 and I went and got this data set for you from the US Geological Survey as all their data is in the public domain and a crop down specifically a Landsat scene on Mumbai and I just want to show you in general imagery but also some interesting things like I mentioned before about how you can manipulate the colors in the Landsat imagery so if I right click on this layer and I'll do add layer to project notice to how it put it sort of in the middle another really basic thing about layers inside a gif software is the order of drawing so I need to actually move this to the bottom of my list of layers so see how my red outline from before now is drawing on top of it and if I were to turn the land-use layers back on and so forth now something to mention briefly about raster or imagery is the spatial resolution if I were to zoom in I'm using my mouse wheel to zoom in now notice how it's all pixelated and you're not gonna get the level of detail like you do with the OpenStreetMap and that's just the reality that comes with Landsat data it's not designed to look at individual buildings however it is good for looking at sort of the bigger picture of an area that you're interested in so let's say I'm doing an environmental investigation of the entire city I'm interested in perhaps how the water quality land-use patterns and so forth and that's where Landsat is good it's often used for broader larger areas of analysis looking at say the rain forest or climate change in the in the Arctic and so forth now an interesting thing like I mentioned before about imagery depending on the kind you have is how you can change the colors so if I were to right-click and go to properties notice for this image I have options for the different bands and I mentioned bands earlier in the video bands are the idea of basically segments of electromagnetic energy that are captured by a remote sensing sensor and Landsat 8 has a whole variety of different bands that it captures and you can manipulate those in the red green and blue color channels so this particular Landsat product is what's called surface reflectance so if I were to put in the red channel band 4 in the green Channel band 3 and the blue Channel band 2 and then hit apply notice how the color of the image changed and this is much more what's called the more natural color view now just to show you some other variations on this idea if I were to put in the red channel band five in the green band green Channel band four and in the blue channel band three you get what's called the color infrared image now notice by just changing which band is displayed in which color Channel I can see differences and this is a kind of representation you would use for looking at vegetation now I honestly am not familiar with the city of Mumbai I've never been there but I can just tell by looking at it you have a very strong urban core area and then areas in red are vegetation and it looks like in this part of the city you have a lot of vegetation that's somewhat healthy but as the more red the color the more healthy the vegetation in question and I can kind of be the look at that I can just see even through the OpenStreetMap we have some forested areas and so forth and you kind of see that in the Landsat image some other tools that are common to GIS would be a measuring tool so for example if I wanted to understand maybe how much vegetation was here I would click here measure area and I can use my mouse to drag a polygon around and you can see how my numbers about 200 450 square meters of area and so forth that's also very common and a useful tool you can use for your spatial analysis okay next I want to show you about using text files in gif as these are very common file formats that are used to share and represent geographic information if I go back to the Mumbai datasets and I take a look at this file that I've given you called Mumbai place-names and they were to open up in a text editor basically what these are our collection of points that represent places within Mumbai now a key thing here is to look it's a little hard to read it just on its own but what this file has are latitude and longitude coordinates that are stored inside of the file itself and what we're going to do is use those coordinates to represent place names from Mumbai as points in the map and so to do that I'm gonna go back over here to the data source manager and I'm gonna go this time underworks has delimited text and I'm gonna go find that file and here it's still a memory Mumbai place names I'm going to open it up if it doesn't prompt you you have to pick what's called a coordinate reference system or CRS now I would suggest wgs84 if when you're working with this data doesn't turn out the way and I hit add I'll close that and if I right-click and zoom to this layer I'll turn off the image you can see a whole bunch of points that are now on the map that represent place names all right now that you've got the place name to add it to the map let's take a closer look at the attribute table of the place names to see what you can do with this new layer if I were to right click open attribute table and if I take a look at some of these columns make note of these two the feature class and the feature code feature CL class and feature CL code and with those I can then create some interesting point representations based on what this place name point represents so the feature class is going to be a letter in this case I'll look at this record right here number three it's an S with a feature code of htl now if I go to the Geo Nimes documentation page you'll see that you have all kinds of documentation on what all those various codes mean so what you first start with is the letter the feature code so I'm gonna go to S so anything that has a feature code of s as a spot building or firm and then if I scroll within the S and HT l stands for hotels and tells you about what it is so place 10 points can be really interesting if you're trying to make a map that shows different features in a given area of interest now if I go back over to my table in some sense this one was kind of easy because it's the Ambassador maybe if you're from Mumbai you know that that's a hotel and so forth but take a look at some of those codes because they can be interesting because what you can do then is similar to like what I showed you before you can right click go to properties to categorize and well not the feature class we want the feature code and then it takes a lot of work but what you can then do for each to htl you can change that to say hotel and perhaps change the symbol around and so forth this is just a quick example I'm showing you just to show you what's possible a lot of hotels around and so forth I hope you found this demonstration useful of course there's way more to this software and other GIS software packages than what I've shown in this relatively brief demonstration however with these datasets and the few things I've showed you plus links to free and open source software you should be able to get started and on your way with learning about geographic information systems or GIS in this video you were given an introduction to geographic information systems or GIS software you should now understand the individual components of the system that comprises GIS you should also understand the concept of map layers which is used to reference various GIS data sets to one another using common geography next you were shown the various functions that GIS can do such as data and spatial asset management which is at the core of any GIS data query encase programming for developing custom applications and tools to extend the capabilities of GIS with application programming interfaces or api's modeling for creating scaled representations of reality and to answer what-if questions cartography and map production which connects modern-day GIS with the millennia-old practice of math making and representation of geographic features animation in 3d which can help to make compelling narratives of geographic information in space and time like the time map example you saw and finally mobile GIS for field data collecting using technologies ranging from smartphones to drones you also learned a little bit about what GIS cannot do points important to keep in mind as you learn more about GIS and need to manage technology expectations finally you were shown a demonstration of a free and open source GIS software package called QGIS the following are references used in preparing this video thanks for watching this video I hope now that you have a good understanding of what's possible in the exciting world of geographic information systems or GIS as a reminder all of the software examples given in this video are free and open source check out the link below in the description to find out how you can access these tools to get started right away with learning about GIS as one final comment this is just the beginning please subscribe to this channel to keep updated on new videos share this video and hit the like button if you enjoyed this video and provide any comments or feedback or questions you may have thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: GIScience

Views: 63,313

Keywords: GIS, GeographicInformationSystems, Geography, GIScience, QGIS, Open Source GeographicInformationScienceandTechnology, GIS&T, Maps, Mapping, Training, Education, Computers, What is GIS, GIS Software, GIS Tutorial, Landsat

Id: jgbTosOPU-U

Length: 51min 43sec (3103 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 13 2020