Original subtitles

We can talk about the procedures that are related to the definition of a GIS,

and probably a good way to think about this is as a flowchart.

Is if you're thinking about a procedure for analyzing data,

the idea is that you're trying to take data and create information,

and there is a difference between those two definitions.

Data, I think of them as

sort of little isolated facts that exist beyond any kind of direct interpretation.

So, if I record the fact that the temperature was a certain amount today,

that's a point of data;

but then if I take that and a bunch of other data points

and then I interpret it or transform it in some way,

that then becomes more valuable or I have a way of seeing more through it, like,

"If I had temperature values for July and August,

for year after year, I could eventually make

the conclusion that it's really warm in July and August."

Now, I know that's pretty obvious, but the idea is that's information,

that's something beyond just individual data points.

So, let's just take an example like housing suitability.

If I'm looking for a house to buy in a city that I live in,

and I'm trying to use different criteria to

decide where should I look for a house to buy,

we might look at things like school locations.

We could create a buffer of distances from those schools to say, "Well,

I want to live within a certain distance of a school,

say have children, and I want them to not have to travel too far to get to that school."

So, that would be one set of criteria,

one set of data and we can say, "Okay."

So, now, we have one data set.

We're going to perform one operation on it using one type of tool,

in this case a buffer,

and that's going to provide us with one output.

So, this is an input,

a tool and an output.

Sometimes a tool, it's referred to as a function,

and so that's the basic idea,

the building blocks of modelling for GIS.

In other words, performing some kind of analysis.

We might add more things to that.

So, we have things like property values.

We might say, "Well, what neighborhoods have values that are within

my price range that are affordable to me versus areas that are unaffordable?"

So, we can use a different tool,

in this case reclassifying,

which will divide the data into different classes based on criteria that I'm interested.

It could just be, like I said, affordable or unaffordable.

We want to of course make sure that we're in a residential zone.

We might look at crime statistics,

and I'm just giving you a kind of a simple version here,

but we could combine all of these things and what's known as a weighted overlay.

In other words, looking at

the same location with different variables and comparing those and saying,

"Which locations across the city match all of the criteria that I'm

interested in for my question that I'm trying to answer?"

And the result would be a set of preferred areas

that we could see in a map that would answer the question that we're interested in.

And so, when we talk about procedures in a GIS,

I know it may sound kind of vague or dry,

but really what it is,

is it's the steps that you're going through to take data,

do something to it to transform it to create information that can then answer a question.

That's really the way I think of the procedures.

So, you may notice that there's one thing that's missing from

our earlier definition of a GIS from this whole thing here,

and that is people,

and it may sound kind of funny.

Some definitions of GIS don't include people.

I like to include it because really people are the key ingredient.

People like you, believe it or not,

that you have to have someone who understands how to

use all of this stuff in order to get something valuable,

and productive and useful out of it.

So, you can have the best hardware,

best software, best data, best procedures,

but if you don't have someone that can actually put all that

together and work with it and create something of value,

then the whole rest of it is pretty much useless.

So, my goal is to be able to enable people to do these things for themselves.

I love being able to watch people learn how to do things,

so that they can then go off and find their own hardware,

software, procedures, data and whatever,

put it all together and then work with it;

and I've also seen in organizations where they didn't have proper staff with

proper skills and it was a lot of wasted time and energy,

it was really inefficient.

So, if you have the proper people with the proper training,

skills and so on, it makes

a huge difference in terms of the overall functioning of a GIS.

So, that's our section on what is a GIS.

I just wanted to give you some definitions,

how to think about it in terms of what it can do and what it's made up of,

give you some examples, the things like datasets and procedures.

So, I hope that gets you thinking about it,

and certainly we have a lot more to learn,

but that's a great place to work from.