An SDI for the GIS-education at the UGent Geography Department

The UGent Geography Department (GD) (ca. 200 students; 10 professors) has been teaching GIS since the mid 90’s. Ever since, GIS has evolved from Geographic Information Systems, to GIScience, to GIServices; implying that a GIS specialist nowadays has to deal with more than just desktop GIS. Knowledge about the interaction between different components of an SDI (spatial data, technologies, laws and policies, people and standards) is crucial for a graduated Master student. For its GIS education, the GD has until recently been using different sources of datasets, which were stored in a non-centralized system. In conformity with the INSPIRE Directive and the Flemish SDI Decree, the GD aims to set-up its own SDI using free and open source software components, to improve the management, user-friendliness, copyright protection and centralization of datasets and the knowledge of state of the art SDI structure and technology. The central part of the system is a PostGIS-database in which both staff and students can create and share information stored in a multitude of tables and schemas. A web-based application facilitates upper-level management of the database for administrators and staff members. Exercises in various courses not only focus on accessing and handling data from the SDI through common GIS-applications as QuantumGIS or GRASS, but also aim at familiarizing students with the set-up of widely used SDI-elements as WMS, WFS and WCS services. The (dis)advantages of the new SDI will be tested in a case study in which the workflow of a typical ‘GIS Applications’ exercise is elaborated. By solving a problem of optimal location, students interact in various ways with geographic data. A comparison is made between the situation before and after the implementation of the SDI

Design and use of web lectures to enhance GIS teaching and learning strategies : the students' opinions

The goal of this research is to design, use and evaluate a set of web lectures, specifically tailored to the needs of students in higher education who follow geographic information system -related courses. Since education in geographic information system includes theoretical concepts and practical experience, both of these teaching strategies will be implemented in the web lectures. The user-centered design approach is used in the design process to increase the acceptance of the web lectures and the motivation to use them: perceived usefulness and ease of use. The results show that the students appreciate the initial set of web lectures, but that they need to be motivated more to use them (especially when theoretical topics are covered). Students still value the "traditional" face-to-face lectures and see the web lectures as an ideal complement

Qualitative Analysis of Polygon Shape-Changes

Traditionally mainly quantitative methods are used for shape representation in domains such as computer vision, pattern recognition, and image analysis. The last decennium the field of qualitative spatial reasoning has emerged, developed in order to model commonsense knowledge of space [1]. This approach is useful to build new generation Geographic Information Systems (GIS) [2]. What’s more, qualitative spatial reasonin

From 3D GIS to ArcheoGIS: first steps towards a timeless conceptual model

In the last decades, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have shown their potential to uncover spatiotemporal relationships between various objects and layers. Although archeologists have more and more utilized these techniques to analyze and interpret relationships between features on site, a full understanding of the possible advantages of the technology is for many still lagging behind. This shows the need to develop a comprehensive GIS for archaeological data which is not only cost-efficient and easy to use, but above all tailored to the requirements of people dealing with archaeological data in the field or as a primary source of information. It is clear that a three-dimensional GIS for archaeologists could hold many advantages over the traditional GIS tools which are mainly oriented towards a 2D representation and analysis of objects in a single time-frame. 3D visualizations have already proven to be valuable tools to record the state of a site and later revisit it in a virtual environment, long after it has been destroyed or heavily altered. Even more importantly, having a 3D overview of the different structures and objects on a site allows for topological and spatial analysis and a better understanding of the relations between the different excavated objects and stratigraphic layers. Overall, a 3D approach would not only enable new ways of handling this specific type of data but could be a starting point for new or improved methodologies all along the chain from fieldwork over analysis to reconstruction. Problems with developing such a system are mainly related to the broad diversity of archeological data and its inherent complexity. The data itself is intrinsically three-dimensional requiring a fully-fledged 3D GIS that is able to cope with the diversity in spatial, geometric and semantic information. Moreover, the temporal aspect that is linked to each of these information particles pushes the requirements even further towards a system that enables handling the fourth dimension and all its associated vagueness and fuzziness. Examining 3D relationships between structures and objects on several archaeological sites, should allow us to detect common characteristics that can be the subject of new or improved methods of 3D analysis that aren’t feasible in a 2D approach. Both these characteristics and the data model used to register and analyze them have an influence on the requirements for the development of a full 3D archeological GIS. Therefore, in this project, a first step towards a timeless archaeological conceptual model is taken, consisting of a case study in which the site ‘Molesme Sur-les-Creux’ functions as a test site for the identification of the most significant characteristics. Subsequently these characteristics are implemented in an extensible data model and its robustness is tested in the analyses expected to be most commonly used. Since this research is part of a bigger project, the next steps should eventually result in a formal definition of a conceptual data model with a common archaeological vocabulary and semantic, geometric and topologic description of archaeological objects that will be put forward as an extension of the GML data structure