Analyst, know thy coordinates
Recognising different coordinate systems can be helpful in speeding up your work. It’s said that the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was inscribed with three key maxims for a good life, one of which was “Know Thyself”. This is, of course, very good advice. For the GIS analyst, knowing yourself helps to know when to […]
A Label Conscious Map
Label classes give us a bit more control over how features can be labelled on maps. We’ve been putting some figures together for a paper coming out of Christy Songola’s master’s thesis. He was looking at using Radon measurements from wells in a braided river plain to determine travel times of groundwater in different seasons. […]
The Heights of Folly
I won’t say I’m a great fan of clear cutting but I suppose some may find this image inspiring (from a recent walk to the Sign of the Packhorse). We start with this as it will later help to illustrate some of the analysis the GIS courses have been doing lately. We’ve been spending a […]
GIS for the Masses!
It’s been a very busy start to the semester here at the GIS Gizmoplex. In our quest for world domination, er, no, fame and fortune, nope, okay, better integration of GIS into courses, we’ve been working on ways for students to use GIS as part of their coursework. It’s been great working with some of […]
Putting Images in their Place
Ah, Monday morning… One message in the inbox this morning brought up a classic GIS workflow. How do I take potentially useful information in something like a PDF and add it to a map? This brings us to georeferencing and digitising. As an example of that, we’ve been working with Peter Almond to put together […]
Challenging Times – Challenging Patches
We dissect how to approach a challenging spatial problem by relying on some basic levels of analysis. We often get a lot of challenging problems of a spatial nature here in the GIS world. A common thread of these is that they often sound easy at the start but get much more complicated when you […]
Difficulties with Degrees
In this post we resolve the problem with our US data points In a previous post we looked in excruciating detail at some point data in the US. After first establishing that many, if not all, were in the wrong place, the next step was figuring out how to fix this, which meant getting to […]
Degrees of Difficulty
To work through a mapping project a bit of detective work was needed to get data in the right place. GIS Central has recently been involved with some global mapping as part of an Our Land and Water project. This has involved collating a wide range of environmental data covering soils, hydrology, vegetation, terrain and […]
Driven Crazy by OneDrive
Avoid losing precious data by practicing some Zen calm Here are GIS Central we’ve been fielding a lot of calls from frustrated users, along the lines of: “I finished my project last night but when I opened it up this morning, everything was gone!” -Frustrated in Whangarei “That layer I spent hours on doesn’t work […]
Spatial Joins Made Easy
We cover a quick and easy way to do temporary spatial joins When we opened up the mail bag here at GIS Central recently, out popped a request from a colleague: “Do we have a mapping table of LAWA monitoring site names to the regional council site names?” Perhaps I should decode this a bit […]
