This document is an updated version of NCGIA Technical Paper 91-20: The NCGIA Guide to GIS Laboratory Materials - 1991. This 1993 update includes approximately 40 pages of new or updated material, plus an appendix which contains a set of eight full-text GIS exercises. The document is a compendium of information pertaining to GIS laboratory education. Our objective is to provide resources which facilitate the establishment of a GIS laboratory curriculum. These resources include references to student exercises produced by the NCGIA, vendors, and other institutions; as well as aids for the creation of new exercises, including ideas for topics and sources of appropriate data.

VT/GIS was developed with two main objectives: first, to investigate the possibility of using a commercially-available GIS package to develop an automated tutorial of a classic model in Geography; and second, to provide students with an interactive environment in which to investigate the results of a spatially-relaxed von Thünen model. This package contains four component documents: an introduction to von Thünen and VT/GIS, a user's manual, and two student exercises.

This unit presents an overview of projection issues that are likely to be encountered by a GIS user. It discusses common map projections and associated parameters, how to determine appropriate projections for certain GIS applications and issues specific to raster data including the choice of grid cell size and resampling methods.

This unit presents an overview of common GIS data formats, computer systems, spatial data handling software programs and scripting languages. Two step-by-step examples are given: (1) converting a text file of point locations to an Arc/Info point coverage; and (2) rounding floating-point data to integer values.

Discusses the interface between a GIS and spatial data analysis and further focuses on three aspects of spatial econometric analysis: (1) spatial weights matrix (2) spatial dependence in regression models (3) the estimation of spatial regression models. Includes software routines for extracting spatial weights matrices from common GIS packages (Arc/Info, packages GAUSS, LIMDEP, RATS, SHAZAM, and SPLUS.