CapabilitiesA GIS will allow students and teachers to create and edit information, analyze information, and display information.
Creating and Editing InformationWith a GIS, there are two basic ways in which you can Create geographic entities: you can digitize these geographic features, or create representations of the geographic entities from tabular information. In addition to data concerning actual location of the geographic entities, a GIS can work with 'attribute data', that is, data describing the properties of the geographic entities. This data, in the form of 'Tables' may be either imported or created, and then linked to the geographic entities. In addition to these capabilities, a GIS can also perform: Digitizing Table digitizing, tracing objects on a paper map; alternately heads-up digitizing, tracing objects on the screen.
Perform event mapping Create point data in other applications
Perform address matching and geocoding Automatically plot street addresses and other address data on a map
Join or merge tables. Access data stored in external databases, "relating" information, features and attributes.
Analyze InformationA GIS allows students and teachers to ask questions about the data, in either tabular (tables) or spatial (map) form. Tabular Queries When working with world population data in a tabular format, the student can ask the question: "How many countries will have a population of more than 30 million in the year 2000?"
Spatial Queries Alternately, when working with business data in a spatial format, a student can ask this questions: "How many customers live within 500m of a highway?
Display InformationSome of the display capabilities of ArcView GIS v3.0, for example, include: Thematic Mapping * with ArcView, you can create attractive output maps of various styles, such as single symbol mapping, graduated colour mapping, unique value mapping, dot density mapping, and chart mapping.
Charts / Graphs*a chart (a.k.a - a graph) is a visual representation of data in a table, especially attributes of geographic features, that can quickly convey information that would otherwise take e a long time to summarize and understand. You can use a chart to display, compare and query your geographic and tabular data effectively. Also, charts in ArcView are especially useful, as they are dynamically linked to your map.
Map Composition*a layout is a map that lets you display views, charts, tables, imported graphics, and graphic primitives. The layout is used to prepare these graphics for output fomr ArcView.
Hot-Linking*Using hot links, you can access virtually any data or application directly from a view. For example, you might click on a province in a map of Canada to display text and graphics about that province. Or, you might click on a city to display a video news clip from that city. The possibilities for multimedia presentations are endless.
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