Geodaten SS2022

Exercise 1: Getting to know QGIS

Student: Bogdana Mair

I documented this exercise in a series of screenshots. I have found it interesting, as it was my first time encountering a GIS and thinking about
georeferenced or spatial data. My primary reason for doing this study program is interest in human health, so my use examples focus on that.

Georeferenced data seems to be irreplaceable in the context of epidemiology and public health. It seems like there is many research questions that could
make use of such data. As concrete ideas:
1. Does the proximity and density of fast food restaurants affect the eating habits of school children? Is there a difference between rural and urban
communities? Here georeferenced data could be connected with patient survey data to get the opinions of children and their parents and with measured
clinical data obtained from their doctors.
2. Do people have better cardiovascular health if there are more bike lanes in their communities?
3. Do people visit the hospital more if they live closer to it? Does every person living in Austria have adequate access to health services? Here,
georeferenced data could be observed together with statistical data about the number and kind of hospital visits, the socioeconomic factors of patients
should not be observed isolated from where they actually live.

Another example would be actually connecting the results of today’s modern analytical methods with the locations where they were made, for modeling
purposes:
Sampling the water many times, and georeferencing results of, for example, mass spectrometric measurements or microbial cell cultures from the samples.
Analyze water quality as a function of the proximity of factories, major traffic routes and the population density near it.

Third example would be not observing georeferenced data, just spatial data in a coordinate system, not referring to the Earth. Modern day regenerative
medicine probably starts with digital analysis of patient photographs and all kind of scans, we got from a simple x-ray to computerized tomography (CT) in
the 20th century, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) too became cheaper and more frequently used. These methods require understanding of 3D data.
Layering
Error occurred that deleted the filter results (I probably lost the VPN connection). I repeated with different filter queries and continued.
Useful links: https://mulloverthings.com/what-is-the-difference-between-cartesian-and-ellipsoidal/
https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/238759/why-is-ellipsoidal-distance-greater-than-cartesian-distance