From the course: Foundations of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

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The data behind the map

The data behind the map - GIS Tutorial

From the course: Foundations of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

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The data behind the map

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- A GIS is so much more than just a map. Every layer in a GIS carries with it an attribute table, which is a database full of information. An attribute is any bit of information about a feature on a map. What's the name of this hospital? What's the total area of this piece of land? There are a few attributes that every modern GIS dataset automatically has, the length of every line and the area of every polygon. Those are calculated automatically. All the other attributes that you see in a GIS dataset were added by some human or collected by some device. Let me show you the attributes in a GIS map. This is a map that shows land records in Linn County, Iowa, right in the Heartland of the United States. This is a GIS map created with Esri software and pre-configured by the Linn County GIS staff. You can open the legend to see what layers are on the map. Notice that the yellow lines are parcels and the orange lines are…

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