Chapter -2

Basic Geographic Concepts

Unlike the real world, our digital environments are composed
of cartographic objects representative of the individual
components of the earth.
These objects differ in size& shape, in color & pattern, & in
scale of measurement & degree of importance.
They can be measured directly by instruments on ground,
sensed by satellites hundreds of miles above the surface,
collected by census takers or extracted from the pages of
documents & maps produced in ages past.
Thus, to explore the modeled world, cartographic objects
must be collected, organized, & synthesized.
The nature of the data often dictates not only how we will later
represent the earth inside GIS but also how effectively well
analyze & interpret the results of that analysis.
In turn, how we view & experience our environment affects
what features we note & how we eventually represent them.
The points, lines, & areas we encounter are all different.

The combination of all these information dictates how the data
are stored, retrieved, modeled & finally output as the result of
analysis.
Here in GIS we have also to store temporal scale & physical
sizes of objects, for that we have to consider the
measurement level which represents their descriptive
conditions or attributes.
At one scale, for ex., points could include whole cities with no
areal extent (area related information), whereas at another,
objects as small as insects or even microbes will be the
important point data under consideration.
The cities may also include, descriptive attributes, such as
their names ( nominal measurement scale); whether their
viability for placing an industry would be considered major,
moderate, or minor (ordinal measurement scale); their
average annual temperature (interval measurement scale); or
the average annual per capita income (ratio measurement
scale).
The 1
st
step toward better GIS skills is to begin to think spatially.
As you become more sensitive to the objects themselves, you will
find it an easy next step to imagine how the objects & interactions
can be.
Developing Spatial Awareness
Here the focus is on one simple underlying principle - the search
for spatial order - separates geography from all the other fields of
study you have encountered.
Many disciplines you have studied, on occasion, asked how
people, places, critters (animals), natural features are;
But only geography continues to concentrate on spatial
relationships as its intellectual framework.
Because of this focus, geographers have developed a language
that reflects the way they think about the space.
This spatial language, like any language allows the geographer to
think more clearly & communicate more concisely about space,
examining only the structures & arrangements of the data which
are necessary to explain spatial phenomena.
The spatial language like any other language becomes filter
through which only the necessary information passes.
It modifies the way we think, what we observe as important, &
how we make decisions.
When you first began to speak, you had difficulty in explaining
exactly what you wanted because your language skills are not
properly developed & complexity of ideas was proportionately
limited.
But as you have grown up your language skills and
understanding capabilities are also increased so you can
easily communicate with others.
Childhood experiences teaches more than the verbal
teaching.
In large part you began to experiment with your spatial
environment.
The excitements of parents when their baby first notices its
big toe is in part a recognition that the process of spatial
recognition has begun.

Later spatial explorations include development of the
concepts of movement & speed through crawling along the
floor, discovering steps, etc
Still later we begun climbing trees, finding the locations of the
new friends, wondering in the woods, etc.
Many of these travels required us to learn route finding so
that we could work our way back to where we began.
Eventually we become more sophisticated spatially, & we
began recognizing that there were shortcuts.
In other words, our spatial world took on a two-dimensional
structure.
We began to comprehend that places and things were either
near or far, straight ahead, or at an angle.
In short, we began to think gegraphically.

We begin to exercise our geographic skills by examining the types
of objects & features we encounter.
Spatial objects in the real world can be thought of as occurring as
four easily identifiable types:
Points, lines, areas & surfaces (see Fig. 2.1 from book)
Collectively these 4 types can represent most of the tangible
natural & human phenomena that we encounter on an everyday
basis.
Inside the GIS, real-world objects will represented explicitly by
three of these object types. Points, lines & areas can be
represented by their respective symbols, whereas surfaces are
most often represented either by point elevations or other
computer structure.
What is most important now is that in GIS, all data are explicitly
spatial.
From our own experience we can easily identify some features like
trees, houses, roads, etc.& each feature is said to be discrete in
that it can occupy only a given point in space at any time.

For the sake of conceptual modeling, these objects are
assumed to have no spatial dimension no length or width
although each can be referenced by its locational coordinates.
Points then are said to have 0 dimensionality (but it is not
true).
For example, if you are looking at a house from only a few
meters away, the structure seems large and occupies a huge
amount of length and width.
This concept changes, however, as you move away :the
house appears less like and areal object and more like
appoint object, the farther away you are (figure 2.2 from
book).
You choose your spatial scale on the basis of different criteria
: whether you want to examine the arrangement of people and
furniture in the house, for example, or whether you are
interested in the house only in relation to other houses,
perhaps for an entire city.
In later case the house would be considered to be a point.
Linear or line objects are conceptualized as occupying only a
single dimension in our coordinate space.
These one dimensional objects may be roads, rivers,
regional boundaries, fences or any kind of objects that is
fundamentally long and very skinny (very thin).
Eventually they look so skinny that it is impersonal to imagine
that they are anything but essentially linear objects.
It also becomes impossible to represent them as more than
one lines because we are so far away that we can no longer
measure them (figure 2.2 from book).
Other lines, such as political boundaries, have no width
dimensions to be considered about.
Actually these lines are not physical entities at all but rather a
construct of political convention and agreement.
Despite their lake of tangibility, however, they can be thought
of as explicitly spatial because their existence separates two
portions of geographic space.
Linear objects, unlike point objects, allow us to measure their
spatial extent by simply finding out how long they are.
In addition, since they are not sited at a single location in
space, we must know at least two points, a beginning and an
end point, to describe the location in space of a given linear
object.
The more complex the line, the more points we will need to
indicate exactly where it is located.
If we take a stream as an example of linear object, the
description of its many twists and turns may require a large
number of points.
More than the streams beginning and ending point we have
included a geometric dimension to measure the shapes and
orientations of linear objects.
Objects observed closely enough to be clearly seen to occupy
both length and width are called areas.
Examples of areas of two dimensional objects include the
area occupied by a yard, the areal extent of a city and an area
as large as a continent.
To describe the location of areas in space, we recognize that
they are composed of series of lines that begin and end at the
same location.
Besides merely indicating the locations of areas using lines,
we are now able to envision three additional properties : as
with lines, we can now describe their shapes and orientations,
but in addition , we can now describe the amount of tertiary
they occupy.
Adding the dimension of height to our features allows us to
observe and record the existence of surfaces.
Although we could certainly observe a house at close range
and describe it in terms of its overall length and width, we
often want to know whether it is a one-story or two-story
structure.
In this way we need to observe the house not as an area but
rather a three dimensional object, having length, width and
height (same for the hills and valleys).
As it turns out, surface features are composed of an infinite
numbers of possible height values.
We say that they are continuous because the possible
values are distributed without interruption continuously across
the surface (figure 2.3 from book).
Because the height of a three dimensional object varies from
one place to another, we can also measure the amount of
change in height with a change in distance from one edge to
another.
From this we can identify the volume of material.
Spatial Measurement Levels
The objects themselves are called entities, & as we have seen,
they describe where they are located and how much space they
occupy.
For ex. A tree, viewed as point feature, might be classified, on
the basis of taxonomists set of terminology, as a pine or an oak.
We could also investigate the age of tree by drilling a core
through the trunk & counting its annual rings.
But before we assign these properties & attributes, we have to
first know that how to measure them. Or else we can not compare
the objects at one location with those at another.
So for that well-established framework exist for all forms of
geographic data.
Fig 2.4 (from book) shows the levels of measurement in terms of
commonly used geographic features like points, lines, area &
surface at nominal, ordinal , interval & ratio levels.
If we want to compare two objects, we must be more precise
in our level of measurement.
So for that lets take the example of tree,
If we were interested in knowing how well a maple tree, an
ash tree, or a pine tree might serve in producing a
comfortable setting for a picnic.
We could place each one on an ordinal scale from best to
worst for picnic area.
Because pine trees often have low branches & tend to drop
sap (liquid in trees) on the ground,
So we probably class pines as the worst of three choices for
our picnic area.
Although ash trees produce less debris (rubbish) & dont have
low branches but its leaves are small so it is not best but
moderate place
And maple tree is the best place because it dont have these
problems
Spatial Location & Reference
Until now we have indicated that we can locate objects in space.
Location is the 1
st
important spatial concept we need, but to locate
objects means that we must have a structured mechanism to
communicate the location of each object observed.
The first type of location is called absolute location & will give
us a definitive, measurable, fixed point in space.
But first we must have a reference system against which to
evaluate such allocation.
In addition reference system must have a fix relationship to the
earth we measure.
The earth is a roughly spherical object.
Around that spherical shape we can use simple geometry to
create a spherical grid system that corresponds to the rules of
geometry.
Diagram that shows Latitude, longitude, equator &
prime meridian
This grid system known as spherical grid system, places two sets
of imaginary lines around our earth (Figure 2.5 from book).
The first set of lines for our spherical grid starts at the middle of
the earth, or equator. These lines are called parallels because they
are parallel to each other and they circle the globe from east to
west.
As we move both north and south from the equator, we draw
additional parallels until we reach the poles.
Because each of these lines is a given angular distance,
measured between center of the earth and the intersection of the
line, each can be used to measure the angular distance from our
starting point at the equator to where the last line would occur at
poles.
The angular distance, called latitude, from the equator to either
pole is equal to one-fourth of the circle, or 90 degrees.
This is only half of our spherical grid system, however to
complete the grid, we need another set of lines running exactly
perpendicular to the first.
The starting point for lines, called meridians, are drawn from
pole to pole.
The starting point for these lines, called the prime meridians,
runs through Greenwich, England, and then circles the globe,
becoming the International date line on the opposite side of the
earth.
The prime meridian is the starting point or zero point for angular
measurement east and west, called longitude.
This system of angular measurements allows us to state the
absolute location of any point on the earth by simply calculating
degrees of latitude north or south of the equator,
and the degrees of longitude east and west of the prime
meridian.
Example (calculating Great circle Distance)
Formulae:- The Great circle Distance (D) on the sphere between two
points A and B is given by:
cos D = (sin a x sin b) + (cos a x cos b cos ||)
where,
a & b are the geographic latitudes of A & B,
and || is absolute value of difference in longitude
between a & b
Eg. Suppose a = 63.5
o
N , b = 25.75
o
N
cos D = (sin 63.5 x sin 25.75) + [cos 63.5 x cos 25.75 x
cos(165.33 80.183)]
= (0.895 x 0.434) + [0.446 x 0.900 x cos(85.147)]
= 0.38843 + [0.446 x 0.900 x 0.0846]
= 0.38843 + 0.0339
= 0.422
D = cos
-1
0.422
= 65.04
o
x 69 miles per
o

= 4488 miles (Approx.)


But as we continue to explore our world, we quickly note that it
would be very useful to be able to describe not only the absolute
locations of objects but also the relationships to other objects in
geographic space.
In fact this relative location becomes quite prominent in our GIS
analysis especially when relative location to other objects affects
operation.
with our absolute grid system, we can determine relative
locations by knowing the absolute distances between any two
objects by simply subtracting the co-ordinates of the smaller from
the larger.
From the standard pythagorean theorem, (fig 2.7 a from book) for
relating the parts of the triangle that has one 90 degree angle, we
can determine the distance of the hypotenuse by so called
distance theorem (fig 2.7 b from book) which is expressed as
follows:
d = (X
2
X
1
)
2
+ (Y
2
Y
1
)
2
Where X
2
X
1
= difference in X direction or longitude
Y
2
Y
1
= difference in the Y direction or latitude.