A Gentle Introduction to GIS
- Type:
- Talk
- Audience level:
- Intermediate
- Category:
- Science
March 10th 1:20 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
Description
Datums! Coordinate systems! Map projections! Topologies! Spatial applications are a nebulous, daunting concept to most Pythonistas. This talk is a gentle introduction into the concepts, terminology and tools to demystify the world of the world.
Abstract
This talk will have multiple parts:
- What is GIS?
- Cartography
- Analysis
- Geodatabases
- Types of data
-
How do you talk about spots on earth?
- What is a datum and why does it matter?
- Spatial reference systems: WUT?
- Map projections: what's appropriate and what's web mercator
-
Great circle distances and geodesy (or, your lines are wrong and you should feel bad)
-
Analysis
- Overlay operators
- Clementini operators
- Buffer, clip their friends
Will demonstrate concepts with commercial tools (the ArcGIS stack) and some open source (GDAL, OGR, QGIS).