GIS and Cartography: Introduction

Reference map

a map that serves to show the location of features, examples include zoning maps, topographic maps, and street maps.

Legend

graphical device found on a map that explains the meaning of symbols and colors found on a map

North arrow

graphical device on a map used to show the orientation of the map

Cartographer

Map maker

Choropleth map

A kind of thematic map where data is displayed in discrete categories. Its geographic regions are colored, shaded, or patterned in relation to a value.

Tabular Data

Both geographic and attribute data can be expressed in tables, such as a CSV file in MS Excel.

​Raster data

Continuous data, or information without hard boundaries or locations.

Thematic map

Designed to convey information pertaining to a specific theme or feature (population, cultural lifestyle, etc.) or phenomena (rainfall, etc.) connected with a geographic area.

"Thick" Maps

Digital maps with annotations, multimedia, pins, paths, polygons, etc.

Visual Hierarchy

Emphasizing certain features of a map above others; leads the user to focus on those elements

Attribute data

Gives additional information about spatial features.

Keyhole Markup Language

KML is a file format used to display geographic data in an Earth browser such as Google Earth. KML uses a tag-based structure with nested elements and attributes and is based on the XML standard.

Vector data

Represented as either points, lines, or polygons. Best for discrete or thematic data, or data with an exact location or hard boundaries.

What is one essential type of data for GIS?

Spatial data

Cartography

The art of creating maps

Scale bar

a graphical device used to represent map scale