Syllabus

Schedule: We will meet for 3-4 hours a week. Computer labs will be available at other times for student use in their assignments. The MapInfo software is available to all students to do their classwork on their own laptops/PCs. We will also do some programming (Excel, MapBasic)

The curriculum will be kept flexible to accommodate the interests of the students. During the semester we will incorporate new interesting data that becomes available.

Instructor Office hours: On request

Grading: will be based on 50% for assignments, 40% on the term project, and 10% on a final take-home project.

Prerequisites: Calculus or permission of instructor. Students are expected to be proficient with Windows OS.

Textbooks:
Principles of Geographic Information Systems by P.A. Burrough and R.A. McDonnell, Oxford University Press, 1998. (Required)
Inside MapInfo Professional, 3rd Edition, by L. Daniel, P. Loree, and A. Whitener, OnWord Press, 2002. (Recommended)
MapBasic Developer's Guide, by A. Whitener and B. Ryder, OnWord Press, 1997. (Reference)

Other References: Some of these are in Folsom Library.
Numerical Recipes by W. H. Press et al., Cambridge University Press, 1989.
MapInfo Professional User's Guide, MapInfo, 1999.

Preliminary list of topics (Reading assignments in brackets):

Topic 1. Introduction to GIS [B&M Chapters 1 and 2]. Introduction to MapInfo Professional software. Map projections and reference systems.

Topic 2. GIS data [B&M Chapters 3 and 4]. Preparing data for MapInfo (geocoding, reformatting). Making simple maps. Layering. Querying and selecting data. Producing thematic maps.

Topic 3. Buffering. Registering raster images. Digitizing from screen.

Topic 4. Geocoding with streets/addresses. Simple interpolation (IDW).

Topic 5. Introduction to geostatistics. Interpolation techniques continued (trend surfaces, Thiesses polygons, inverse distance weighting, splines) [B&M Chapter 5].

Topic 6. Interpolation continued (variograms, kriging) [B&M Chapter 6]

Topic 7. Analysis of continuous surfaces (filtering, slopes, shading) [B&M Chapter 8]

Topic 8. Analysis of errors [B&M Chapters 9 and 10].

Topic 9. Analysis of discrete entities [B&M Chapter 7].

Topic 10. Graphs, grouping, pie charts [Daniel et al., Chapters 6-8]

Topic 11. Editing attributes, manipulating objects in MapInfo [Daniel et al., Chapter 9]

Topic 12. Making a map from scratch, field observations

Topic 13. Class project presentations

and ....

Guest lecturers - Rensselaer County Principal Planner, USGS GIS expert, mystery guests?

Class Homepage http://www.rpi.edu/~mccafr/gis/

Updated on 1/13/09