Professional Land Surveyors are the only profession that create the legal description of land parcels, which are then officially recorded to show ownership and rights pertaining to each and every land parcel within a jurisdiction. The Surveyor is skilled at undertaking the physical measurements that are needed to locate accurately land parcels on the ground and to write the unambiguous legal description of the land to create legal title in real estate. These land ownership records are critical for the transfer of ownership in the real estate market. The legal land description provided by Surveyors forms the foundation, and the real estate market provides the mechanism, for real estate to become the largest store of tangible wealth in any free market economy.
Formalize attribute values and domains in terms of set theory
Develop alternative forms of representations for situations in which attributes do not adequately capture meaning
Define Stevens’ four levels of measurement (i.e., nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio)
Describe particular geographic phenomena in terms of attributes
Determine the proper uses of attributes based on their domains
Characterize the domains of attributes in a GIS, including continuous and discrete, qualitative and quantitative, absolute and relative
Recognize situations and phenomena in the landscape which cannot be adequately represented by formal attributes, such as aesthetics
Compare and contrast the theory that properties are fundamental (and objects are human simplifications of patterns thereof) with the theory that objects are fundamental (and properties are attributes thereof)
Recognize attribute domains that do not fit well into Stevens’ four levels of measurement such as cycles, indexes, and hierarchies
Compare and contrast the U.S. federal government’s policy regarding rights to geospatial data with similar policies in other countries
Compare and contrast the consequences of different national policies about rights to geospatia data in terms of the real costs of spatial data, their coverage, accuracy, uncertainty, reliability, validity, and maintenance
Describe organizations’ and governments’ incentives to treat geospatial information as property
Outline arguments for and against the notion of information as a public good
Argue for and against the treatment of geospatial information as a commodity
Describe real world applications where distance decay is an appropriate representation of the strength of spatial relationships (e.g., shopping behavior, property values)
Explain the rationale for using different forms of distance decay functions
Explain how a semi-variogram describes the distance decay in dependence between data values
Outline the geometry implicit in classical “gravity” models of distance decay
Plot typical forms for distance decay functions
Write typical forms for distance decay functions
Write a program to create a matrix of pair-wise distances among a set of points
Describe real world applications where distance decay would not be an appropriate representation of the strength of spatial relationships (e.g., distance education, commuting, telecommunications)
Critique the assertion that public participation GIS promotes democracy
Explain how community organizations’ use of geospatial technologies can alter existing community power relations
Explain how geospatial technologies can assist community organizations at each rung of the ladder of public participation
Explain the challenge of representing within current GIS software local knowledge that is neither easily mapped nor verified
Discuss advantages and disadvantages of six models of GIS availability, including communitybased GIS, university-community partnerships, GIS facilities in universities and public libraries, “Map rooms,” Internet map servers, and neighborhood GIS centers.
Explain why some community organizations may encounter more difficulty than others in acquiring geospatial data from public and private organizations
Figure 1. PySAL within QGIS Processing Toolbox: Hot-spot analysis of Homicide Rates in Southern US Counties.
Python is a popular language for geospatial programming and application development. This entry provides an overview of the different development modes that can be adopted for GIS programming with Python and discusses the history of Python adoption in the GIS community. The different layers of the geospatial development stack in Python are examined giving the reader an understanding of the breadth that Python offers to the GIS developer. Future developments and broader issues related to interoperability and programming ecosystems are identified.
DC-01 - Professional Land Surveying
Professional Land Surveyors are the only profession that create the legal description of land parcels, which are then officially recorded to show ownership and rights pertaining to each and every land parcel within a jurisdiction. The Surveyor is skilled at undertaking the physical measurements that are needed to locate accurately land parcels on the ground and to write the unambiguous legal description of the land to create legal title in real estate. These land ownership records are critical for the transfer of ownership in the real estate market. The legal land description provided by Surveyors forms the foundation, and the real estate market provides the mechanism, for real estate to become the largest store of tangible wealth in any free market economy.