Thursday, February 7, 2008

Day 3 - GIS111

The class started off with a beautiful sunset. Unfortunately the 90 some slides were not has colorful. The news of the day was that we had a test next week. So I guess I will have to study some Wednesday night. Tonight we discussed Geodesy & Coord Systems as well as Map Projections. In the first half of the lecture, topics were centered around Ellipsiods, Geoids, and Sphere. The second half of the lecture was centered around Map Projections, their distortion properties, and how ArcMap defines projections and projects datasets.

Chapter 19 Map

Module 3 - Random Projections

World Loximuthal and WGS 1984 Antarctic Polar Stereographic projection types






Friday, February 1, 2008

Day 2 - GIS111

I survived another night in class. We discussed data models (coords and attributes), vector vs. raster data (as well as TIN), and the Geodatabase (new for 9.2). We worked on setting up a Geodatabase in the lab exercise. Although in the exercise we created a new feature class (waterlines), but there is no data. Maybe in another exercise we will import a waterlines mdb (atttribute table)?

I had wondered if someone had plotted Bent Creek out yet and sure enough Pete showed us a KML (Keyhole Markup Language) of the trails. He mentioned that another classmate has a more detailed file that he hopes to share at a later date. Also, a future class exercise will be to create a new map of Bent Creek. How exciting!!! I want to go and buy a GPS unit now.