National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

This outline gives an overview of the units that comprise the Core Curriculum in GIScience, along with hyperlinks to each. Note that hyperlinks are active only from the downloaded PDF document. 

This introduction provides context to the Core Curriculum in GIScience, including its design philosophy, organization of core concepts, editorial procedure, a development timetable, list of original developers and editorial notes. Note that hyperlinks are active only from the downloaded PDF document.

This section is not typical of the other sections of the curriculum in that it is primarily directed at instructors intending to use the Core Curriculum as a resource in their own curriculum design, rather than as materials to teach with.  However, the materials might be used directly by instructors teaching the methodology of geographical education as part of an education elective within higher education. This section includes two units: Curriculum design for GIS (Unit 159) and Teaching and learning GIS in laboratories (Unit 160).

This unit describes contexts for GI Technologies; the use of GI technologies in society; the British Columbia case study; and key issues.

This unit introduces the terms and concepts needed to understand non-spatial databases and their underlying data models, including a motivation of the need for database management systems; an overview of database terminology; and a description of non-spatial data models.

This unit covers topics including the definition of raster; raster layers, how they are sampled from reality and how they represent reality; geometry and topology of rasters and edge effects on rasters; other forms of rasters including hexagonal and curved surfaces; run length encoding; and issues about working with rasters.

This unit covers the definition of process modeling and simulations; types of processes relevant to GIS; approaches to process modeling and simulations; calibration, error propagation and sensitivity analysis; integration of process models and GIS; and application examples.

This unit covers topics including the basic elements of a network; how networks are represented; commonly used shortest path algorithms; and common application areas in which networks are used.

This unit considers maps as representations and contrasts maps with other representations of the world. It also contrasts the representational view with other views of maps.

This unit explains the purpose of exploratory data analysis and exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA); the model which underlies statistical ESDA; the importance of cartographical, graphical and tabular tools in processing geographical data for ESDA; a range of ESDA techniques and their use in analyzing geographical data; and the limitations of current GIS software for undertaking ESDA.