GEOG 365Intermediate GIS Programming

3 credits · Geography · Penn State

The rate at which geospatial data are being generated exceeds our ability to analyze them. These developments are quickly leading toward a data-rich but knowledge-poor environment. New challenges arise from an unprecedented access to massive amounts of data. Specialized algorithms are needed to address these scientific and computational challenges and provide innovative and effective solutions to analyze these large, often multi-modal, spatio-temporal datasets generated by high-resolution sensors or computational models. Traditional computational frameworks are specialized to serve a single science application, and are not flexible to drive diverse models on changing computational platforms. GEOG 365 addresses this new challenge by introducing specialized algorithms and data structures to analyze and visualize large and rapidly changing Earth science data. The emphasis of this course is on specialized data mining algorithms suitable for spatial data and spatio-temporal data with geoscience and Earth science applications. This course teaches how to automate GIS tasks using scripting languages. Automation can make work easier, faster, and more accurate, and knowledge of a scripting language is a highly desired skill in GIS analysts. This course dedicates time to programming fundamentals so that the skills learned can be applied to languages. Increased ability to adapt to new technologies and programming languages will be the greatest benefit students gain from this course.