Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

http://www.hopkinsvilleky.us/agencies/planning-commission/planning-page-photos/gis.jpg

I've been researching GIS a bit with an eye towards going back to school or getting some kind of certification. Anyone here have any experience with this kind of technology? Apparently it's a hot job market and can be applied to almost any pursuit, and I've been a geography nerd since forever so making crazy maps sounds like a good time.

i do dat

take an ESRI class, esp if u have a job thatll pay for it

if not, maybe try a local community college?

That ESRI site looks great, I hadn't seen it yet. Thanks!

There are a few places around Chicago that offer short term certification classes. Would you say that's a better way to get introduced to it than making the commitment of studying at a university?

I took a few GIS classes last year (in the context of city planning and the environment) and they were really fun. And you're right, it's going to be a growing field for years to come.

I use ArcMap all day. I worked at my city planning office for the last two years as a technician, and I'm finishing up my masters thesis this month. I'm using a NASA MODIS Enhanced Vegetation Index raster time-series set to analyze where and to what extent a hardwood forest canopy sustained decreased productivity after an usually severe late-spring freeze. I used a set of observed daily minimum temperatures and daily average min temps from the NOAA for the freeze period. I had to do some heavy geoprocessing to calculate the daily averages for the EVI images and now I'm working on spatial analysis to compare EVI anomaly throughout the growing season with a temperature-based damage index generated from the minimum temperature anomaly rasters. Pretty rad imo. I'm doing regression analysis/covariance matrixes tomorrow and then doing some other spatial statistics on how the forest did vs. how other surrounding landcover types did.

i recommend getting a book that comes with a trial-license disc. that way you can play around with it on the cheap and see if it's something you want to pursue further.

if you take a class and you're funding it yourself, take it through a community college. i took it at USC because my advisor said i could take it to fulfill one of my degree requirements, but in general i wouldn't spend private-school tuition on it.

you can also request a free 60 day trial for ArcGIS from ESRI's website i.e. here: http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcview/eval/evaluate.html

Really looks like SimCity.

but...layers. i've messed with arcgis, it's fun. i took an e pensive class in it. and would agree with the above, start with CC or book/trial copy

dan do you want to do GIS for personal use or get into it professionally?

A lot of it is database management skills so if you're handy with MS Access, or have a background in math, statistics, networking/anything IT it'll be pretty natural. However, even if you're like me and you were a C-student in high school and flunked out of Arizona State and started again at a community college choosing geography as a major for no reason other than you had a superficial interest in trivial stuff like physical and cultural Earth "regions," you may do fine and even like it. Be prepared to go a little deeper than an intro raster and/or vector class though, and constantly be thinking about things you could map. Creativity, being able to solve problems or answer questions with GIS is just as valuable as technical knowledge and familiarity with the software.

I was thinking professionally, most likely.

I was already looking into going back to school for some version of history/geography or possibly MBA. I'm no developer but I know my way around a computer and I'm not too worried about being able to pick up any database stuff I don't know. Also I went to the state geography bee in 8th grade. My more recent work was in publishing so making maps for books or online would be dope imo.

Is there something specific you'd like to do with it? If you're doing publishing work and you want to make maps but don't want to get in over your head with ESRI, there's this new indiemapper software that's supposed to be decent and won't bog you down with geodetics.

No, nothing specific at the moment besides being interested in the technology as a tool that might be worth learning more about. I'm out of work at the moment, so it struck me as something I could pay addition to when/if I go for more schooling.

addition? fucking hell

attention

thought this was kinda neat. in 1984, epidemiologist Frank Garland overlaid a pair of maps to reveal a geospatial correlation between colon cancer by county (first map, in red and blue) and the degree of cumulative annual solar intensity (second map/isobars in the first). given that vitamin d is known to be a preventative factor for colon cancer, and that sunlight is known to stimulate vitamin d production, Garland's theory was the existence of an inverse relationship between the two. the map produced by his study appears to confirm this. subsequent research has also produced map correlations between spatial patterns of insolation and various other internal-organ cancers (not skin cancer).

http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0311/graphics/diseasemap_3_lg.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Us_pv_annual_may2004.jpg

with GIS today, raster-based analysis is relatively easy, and it enables the user to quantify the degrees of such correlation using fairly complicated spatial statistics that in 1984 would have taken Garland the remainder of the 80s. the hard part is really just acquiring the data itself. at least with environmental studies (what I use GIS for), NASA, NOAA, and other government agencies are pretty good about providing geospatial data to researchers who have ideas about correlations that they want to test.

Is anyone in this bitch familiar with ArcGIS? If so I have an embarrassing rookie question.

Fire away, if you're still looking.

well, I'm not at work now so I'm not looking at ArcGIS as I type this, but I'm having trouble using Select by Attribute.

I have a table with a column called "Fed_Facility", which can be either 'Y', 'N', or null. In this table there are about 1300 rows with 'Y', and another 20,000 with 'N', and I'm trying to select just the ones with 'Y'.

So in Select by Attribute, I select the appropriate layer and then make the simple query:

'Fed_Facility' = 'Y'

I don't get a syntax error, but it gives me 0 results. When I Verify the query, it says the syntax is fine but there are 0 results that fit the bill. What's really confusing me is that in all the reference materials I can find, like this, it displays

SELECT * FROM [name of layer] WHERE

but on my screen (at work, that is), it's just

SELECT * FROM

and at the top of my dialog box, it says something like "Add WHERE to select" or something like that. I don't understand why mine is missing the WHERE part, and I can't figure out how to add it in.

I'm sure this is something really basic. And at this point it's not even about a practical need - I know I can just go to the attribute table and sort by that column and select all the rows with 'Y' in them and accomplish what I'm looking to do. But I just want to know how to do it using Select By Attributes!

You've stumped me - I can't find any cases in ArcGIS where there is no WHERE already supplied. This is a fairly current version (9 or 10), right?

Some random possibilities:

-try going into Select by Attributes through somewhere else; if you've been accessing it through the general Selection menu, go through the layer's Table Options, or vice versa

-SQL changes a little depending on the kind of database you are accessing - try moving the file in question to a new geodatabase?

-the old reliable quit and restart...

Assuming you do get the where clause into your query, I do try never to actually type anything in the SQL if I can help it - work with the existing buttons and populate Get Unique Values to generate your query. Sorry not to be of more help...

thanks for your help! i'm back at work so here's a screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/6W2vmSW.jpg

i'm assuming your second possibility - "SQL changes a little depending on the kind of database you are accessing - try moving the file in question to a new geodatabase?" - is the problem. since i'm new to GIS i can't even describe this very well, but i'm grabbing the layers from an internal govt. database and everything seems to be very protected. i spent about 2 hours yesterday trying to figure out how to make edits to the data, and it seems like i'm not allowed - you can export it excel but when you try to import it back in you get an error, and it won't let you start an "editing session" from within arcGIS because the "Layer or table is not registered as versioned".

ehh...i don't know, i'm sure that i'll figure this stuff out eventually i think it all might be related to the problem of not being to make changes to the underlying data? i dunno.

Yeah, it's generally easier to make local copies of data you're accessing, especially because of the ability to edit - I'm assuming they don't want you to change their copy! If it'll let you, I'd try to copy these files in the ArcCatalog window to your own computer - but who knows with government access, and the exact method would depend, I think, on the kind of database you're pulling from. If this is publicly available data, you might just want to download it from the appropriate portal.

Dumb question, but have you just tried manually adding WHERE at the beginning of the expression in the version of the dialog box you're getting?

Dumb question, but have you just tried manually adding WHERE at the beginning of the expression in the version of the dialog box you're getting?

not dumb at all! I did try - it seems like there should be a way to do it, but I kept getting syntax errors.

update: good + incredibly frustrating news: i tried the query again ('FEDERAL_FACILITY_CODE'='Y') and now...it works? I think it was because I was putting a space on either side of the equals sign?

very sorry to have wasted your time. I like GIS but things like this really frustrate me.

No worries - I teach it to grad students and it still gives me fits. The extra space = syntax error thing is why I always try to generate the expression from the boxes. As you use it, you build up this whole catalog of mysterious procedural taboos and half the time you forget why they're so important - until some mysterious thing breaks and you have to troubleshoot every little piece of your process. But yeah, it can be very rewarding and a lot of fun!

Yeah, I'm pretty excited to be using it. I took a intro GIS course in grad school, and dabbled with it at home here and there the last few years, but I just started a new position at work where I can actually really use it for the first time for the purposes of analysis. I will definitely generate the expression from the boxes from now on!