[Dept. of Computer Science] Geographic Information Systems: block 4, April-July 2009
Lecturer:
Marc van Kreveld, office A207 of Centrumgebouw Noord

What, how much, when, where:
Course and project. 7.5 ECTS. Block 4, Tuesdays from 11.00-12.45 (BBL-420) and Thursdays from 13.15-15.00 (BBL-420).
Lecture part: 10 x 2 hours course plus 10 x 4 hours reading/home study, plus 40 hours exam preparation plus 3 hours exam, makes a total of 103 hours. Installing and playing with ArcExplorer demo: 5 hours. Project part: 100 hours.
Project:
During the class of April 28 the projects will be outlined and distributed. Projects are done in teams of two students. There will be three meetings with the lecturer to discuss ideas. Twice, a written text must be handed in. At the end, each project will be presented by the students to their fellow students and the lecturer. Here you can find the project description.

Project PP slides
Project teams and topics:
Stefan and Marcel: Label placement for groups of islands
Rebecca and Alexandra: Relative positions of regions
Rajat and Cetin: Selection of roads in road networks
Wouter and Lionov: Non-contiguous-area cartograms
Jasper and Steven: Valleys and ridges
Lecture schedule:
21 April: Introduction; Geographic data
23 April: Representation of geographic data

28 April: Buffer, area, description; Project description and distribution (presence mandatory!)
30 April: No class (queens day)

5 May: No class (liberation day)
6 May: Extra: First project meetings
7 May: Sources; Quad trees

12 May: R-trees
14 May: Geographic analysis

19 May: Cartographic generalization
20 May: Extra: Second project meetings
21 May: No class (ascension day)

26 May: Label placement
28 May: Project presentations I, and also Project: first hand-in

2 June: No class (exam week)
4 June: No class (exam week),
4/5 June: Extra: Third project meetings

9 June: No class (project work time)
11 June: No class (project work time)

16 June: Elevation models and algorithms, part I
17 June: Optional: Fourth project meetings
18 June: Elevation models and algorithms, part II, and Trajectories

23 June: No class!!!
25 June: Project presentations II

July 2: Final exam
July 5 (Sunday): Project: second hand-in

August 27, 14-17: Final exam, in BBL-503 (different from schedule)

Presentations must take 20 minutes, no longer and no shorter. Afterwards there is opportunity for questions and discussion. Treat the different project phases and aspects, except for the analysis of which criteria enforce or conflict.

Course material:
There is no book or reader, but there are copies of texts available for several parts of the lectures. The lectures are not based on these texts, but provide additional information that largely overlaps with the lectures. All PowerPoint presentations are available on this website as well.
21 April: Read book chapter 1 from "An Introduction to Geographical Information Systems" by I. Heywood et al. (second edition). Read book chapter 2 from "Geographical Information Systems and Computer Cartography" by C.B. Jones. Check out ESRI website. See the Introduction and Data PP presentions.
23 April: Read book chapter 3 from "Concepts and Techniques of Geographic Information Systems" by C.P. Lo and A.K.W. Yeung (second edition). See the Representation PP presentation. Download ArcExplorer and data sets (see below), and play with it.
28 April: See the Area, Buffer, ... PP presentation. Read all about the project and start it.
7 May: Read chapter 2 from "Cartography: Visualization of spatial data" by M.-J. Kraak and F. Ormeling (second edition). See the Sources and the Quad tree PP presentations.
12 May: Read the entry on R-trees from the Encyclodia of GIS. See the R-trees PP presentation.
14 May: Read book chapter 10 from "Concept and Techniques of Geographic Information Systems" by C.P. Lo and A.K.W. Yeung (second edition). See the Geographic analysis PP presentation.
19 May: See the Generalization PP presentation.
26 May: See the Label placement PP presentation.
16, 18 June: Chapter "Digital elevation models and TIN algorithms". Survey on TIN algorithms and another survey which largely overlaps, and Section 6 may be skipped (compression and decompression). See the postscript transparencies.
23 June: See the Trajectories PP presentation.


PP Introduction (updated 2009)

PP Geographic data (updated 2009)

PP Representation of geographic data (updated 2009)

PP Sources (updated 2009)

PP Area, buffer, description (updated 2009)

PP Quad trees (updated 2009)

PP R-trees (updated 2009)

PP Geographic analysis (updated 2009)

PP Generalisation (updated 2009)

PP Label placement

Elevation models, I
Elevation models, II
Elevation models (part I alternative) part 1, part 2, part 3.

PP Trajectories

Exam, final mark:
The exam determines 60% of the final mark. The other 40% is determined by the project. Both scores (exam, project) should be at least a 5, otherwise the minimum of the scores is the final mark.

The grades below are the exam grades of the July 2, 2009 exam. They are not the final grades, because the project grade is not incorporated yet.

0433713: 9.5
3336727: 4
3322092: 8.5
3190137: 6.5
3019802: 7
3236943: 3
3197093: 5.5
3019837: 7.5
3301990: 9
3042898: 8.5
3304515: 7


Some previous exams:

Exam 2006
Second exam 2006
Exam 2007
Second exam 2007
Exam 2008
Second exam 2008

GIS links on the Web
ESRI, makers of Arc/Info (also for downloading ArcExplorer and data (via AOL, Arc Data On-line))
Web page for downloading ArcExplorer. And here you find suitable test data. And here is some local test data: Concord, AETutor.
Oddens Bookmarks, Many links to maps, cartography, etc.
MapQuest, Many maps

Last update (Marc van Kreveld): 28 July 2009