GIS Fundamentals, 2nd Edition

Preface

When I set out to design a GIS course for third-year undergraduates in the Department of Geography at Sheffield University, I decided to include some material on how GIS worked at a fundamental level. The students were already familiar with how to use GIS from earlier courses, and so the next obvious step was to understand how they worked. An analogy which I often use is that they knew how to drive the car – now it was time to learn how the internal combustion engine works. The problem I faced was that there was very little reading that I could provide for them which was at a level that they could understand. Some of the early work in GIS was undertaken by geographers, but modern GIS systems draw on ideas developed in mainstream computer ...