Discussion Questions

1. Scale is an essential property of any GIS project.  Explain.
2. Geographic problems can be distinguished based on their purpose, either scientific or practical.  Explain.
3. What is precision agriculture and why is it a geographic problem?
4. Geographic problems involve varying temporal scales.  What are operational, tactical, and strategic decisions?
5. What does it mean to say that a geographic database is transactional?
6. What was considered the first GIS and for what was it used?
7. Define and contrast the terms spatial and geospatial.
8. Explain some of the technical reasons why geograpic information is special.
10. What are geodemographics?
11. What is market area analysis and how are geodemographic data used to do it?
12. How was a GIS used to identify people to send leaflets for marketing a new gas station?
13. What is the ecological fallacy?
14. What is one possible problem with using linera radial distance in defining a market area?
15. In order to plan an emergency evacuation of the population of a city such as Santa Barbara, what GIS layers would you need?  What is the purpose of each layer?
16. What are the topological properties of connectivity, adjacency, and intersection?
17. Give one example each of operational, tactical, and strategic transportation and logistics GIS applications.
18. What is gap analysis?
19. What is nominal data?
20. What is a corridor in conservation planning and how can a GIS be used to identify where they are needed?

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