Introduction to GIS

By:
Dr. Archana Gupta
 Geographical Information Science
• By seventeenth century, skilled cartographers
such as Mercator demonstrate that:
• Map making using mathematical projection
and set of coordinates, improves reliability of
the measurement and location of area of land
• Provide a model having spatial phenomenon
in standard way which can be used for
navigation.
• By Eighteenth century, Geographical Information
Society was first created through the
establishment of national government bodies to
produce cadastral and topographical maps.
• Geodetical surveying, photogrammetry and
cartography – tools for accurately recording and
representing the location and characteristics of
well defined Natural and Anthropomorphic
Phenomenon.
• By nineteenth Century, for the scientific study,
different kinds of attributes needed to be
mapped like Geophysical, geodesy, geology,
geomorphology, soil science, ecology and
land.
• These special purpose maps are referred as
Thematic Maps. Because they contain
information about single subject or theme.
 Definitions of GIS
• The tool-base definition
GIS is a powerful set of tools for collecting, storing,
retrieving at will, transforming and displaying spatial data
from the real world for a particular set of purposes.
• The geographical (or spatial) data represent
phenomena from the real world in terms of
(a) their position with respect to a known coordinate
system,
(b) their attributes that are unrelated to position (such as
colour, cost, pH, incidence of disease, etc.) and
(c) their spatial interrelations with each other which
describe how they are linked together (this is known as
topology and describes space and spatial properties such
as connectivity which are unaffected by continuous
distortions).
Geographical information systems have three
important components—
• computer hardware
• set of application software modules
• a proper organizational context including
skilled people.
 Computer hardware
General hardware components of a geographical information system are:
 GIS SOFTWARE
• The software for a geographical information
system maybe split into five functional groups:
• (a) Data input and verification
• (b) Data storage and database management
• (c) Data output and presentation
• (d) Data transformation
• (e) Interaction with the user.
Software components of a GIS
 Data input and verification
• Data input covers capturing spatial data from existing maps, field
observations, and sensors (including aerial photography, satellites, and
recording instruments) and converting them to a standard digital form.
• Many tools are available including the interactive computer screen and
mouse, the digitizer, word processors and spreadsheet programs, scanners
for direct recording of data or for converting maps and photographic images
 Data storage and database
management
It concerns the way in which data about dislocation, linkages (topology), attributes
of geographical elements (points, lines, areas, and more complex entities
representing objects on the earth’s surface) are structured and organized, in both
way - handled in the computer and perceived by the users.
 Data output and presentation
• Data output and presentation concern the ways the data are displayed
and how the results of analyses are reported to the users. Data may be
presented as maps, tables, and figures, hardcopy output drawn on printer
or plotter to information recorded on magnetic media in digital form.
 Data transformation
• Data transformation embraces two classes of operation :
a. transformations needed to remove errors from the data or to
bring them up to date or to match them to other data sets, and
b. the large array of analysis methods that may be applied to the
data in order to achieve answers to the questions asked of the
GIS
 Interaction with the user
• Most systems provide a range of interfaces by
which the user can interact with the system.
• The simplest are menu-driven commands that
can be selected by simply pointing and clicking
with the mouse
• An alternative is for the user to type in simple
commands via a command language
interpreter (CLI).
• https://myposhanvatika.in/

• https://communitygis.net/

• https://gscl.assam.gov.in/projects/detail/gis-
platform-for-guwahati-smart-city
 Conceptual models of real world
geographical phenomena
• Geographical phenomena require two
descriptors to represent the real world; what
is present such as 'town', 'river', 'floodplain',
'ecotope', 'soil association , and where it is.
Conceptual models of space: entities
or fields
• Entities:
• perceive the space as being occupied by entities which are
described by their attributes or properties, and whose
position can be mapped using a geometric coordinate
system
• Fields:
• imagine that the variation of an attribute of interest varies
over the space as some continuous mathematical function
or field.
 Entities
• Defining and recognizing the entity (is it a
house, a cable, a forest, a river, a
mountain?) is the first step;
• listing its attributes, defining its boundaries
and its location is the second.
 Continuous field
• Represent geographical space in continuous 2
or 3 dimensional space
• Attribute (pressure, temperature, elevation,
etc) varies smoothly or continuous over that
space.
• Using Entity approach to represent Hill may
give information regarding Name, who climb
the hill and the records. But it will not give any
information regarding slope of its sides.
• Using continuous field approach gives the
slope but not the names.
 Geographical Data Models
• Geographical data model are the formalized
equivalent of Conceptual Data Model.
• They formalize how
– space is discretized into parts for analysis and
communication.
– Attributes measured and recorded
 Entity Approach

• Anthropogenic phenomena such as houses, land parcels,

administrative units, roads, cables, pipelines, agricultural
fields are best represented by Entity Approach.

• Which can be further subdivided according to one of the

three basic geographical data primitives, namely a ‘point’, a
‘line’, or an ‘area’ /‘polygon’ .

• These are fundamental units of vector data Model.

• With continuous field data, although the variation
of attributes such as elevation, air pressure,
temperature, or clay content of the soil is assumed
to be continuous in 2D or 3D space (and also in
time), the variation is generally too complex .
• Both the .entity and tessellation models assume
that the phenomena can be specified exactly in
terms of both their attributes and spatial position.
 TYPES OF GIS DATA
• Vector
• In the vector data model, features on the
earth are represented as:
– Points
– Lines
– Polygons
• Raster
• In the raster data model, a geographic
feature like land cover is represented as:
– single square cells

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Computer representations of geographic
information
• Raster Representation
– Regular Tessellation
– Irregular tessellations
• Vector representations

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 Regular Tessellation

• A tessellation (or tiling) is a partitioning of

space into mutually exclusive cells that
together make up the complete study space

Square cells Hexagonal cells Triangular cells

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• In all regular tessellations, the cells are of the
same shape and size, and the field attribute
value assigned to a cell is associated with the
entire area occupied by the cell
• A raster is a set of regularly spaced (and
contiguous) cells with associated (field)
values. The associated values represent cell
values, not point values. This means that the
value for a cell is assumed to be valid for all
locations within the cell.
• The size of the area that a single raster cell
represents is called the raster’s resolution

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• The field value of a cell can be interpreted as one for the complete
tessellation cell, in which case the field is discrete, not continuous or
even differentiable.
• Some convention is needed to state which value prevails on cell
boundaries; with square cells, this convention often says that lower
and left boundaries belong to the cell.
• To improve on two things can be done:
– Make the cell size smaller, so as to make the ‘continuity gaps’
between the cells smaller
– Assume that a cell value only represents elevation for one specific
location in the cell, and to provide a good interpolation function
for all other locations that has the continuity characteristic.
Values for other positions than these must be computed through
some form of interpolation function, which will use one or more
nearby field values to compute the value at the requested position.
This allows us to represent continuous, even differentiable, functions

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 Irregular tessellations
• Partitions of space into mutually disjoint cells
• The cells may vary in size and shape, allowing
them to adapt to the spatial phenomena that
they represent
• Irregular tessellations are more complex than the
regular ones, but they are also more adaptive,
which typically leads to a reduction in the
amount of memory used to store the data.
• A well-known data structure in this family—upon
which many more variations have been based—is
the region quadtree

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An 8 8, three-valued raster and its representation as a
region quadtree. To construct the quadtree, the field is
successively split into four quadrants until parts have only a
single field value. After the first split, the southeast
quadrant is entirely blue, and this is indicated by a blue
square at level two of the tree. Other quadrants had to be
split further

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• Quadtrees are adaptive because they apply the spatial
autocorrelation principle
• Locations that are near in space are likely to have
similar field values. When a conglomerate of cells has
the same value, they are represented together in the
quadtree, provided boundaries coincide with the
predefined quadrant boundaries.
• We can also state that a quadtree provides a nested
tessellation: quadrants are only split if they have two or
more values. The square nodes at the same level
represent equal area sizes, allowing quick computation
of the area associated with some field value.
• The top node of the tree represents the complete
raster.

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 Vector representations
• In vector representations, an attempt is made
to explicitly associate georeferences with the
geographic phenomena
• A georeference is a coordinate pair from some
geographic space, and is also known as a
vector
• Point
• Line
• Area

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 Point
• extra data is stored for each point object
called attribute or thematic data that can
capture anything that is considered relevant
about the object.

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 Line
• Line data are used to represent one-
dimensional objects such as roads, railroads,
canals, rivers and power lines
• Collections of (connected) lines may represent
phenomena that are viewed as networks.

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 Area / Polygon
• apply a boundary model
• Polygon structure
• Boundary Model

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• GISs help to analyse and understand more
about processes and phenomena in the real
world.
• spatial phenomena occurs in a two- or three-
dimensional Euclidean space
• ES is a model of space in which locations are
represented by coordinates—(x, y) in 2D; (x, y, z)
in 3D—and distance and direction can defined
with geometric formulas

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 Geographic Phenomenon
• Geographic phenomenon is defined as a
manifestation of an entity or process that:
– Can be named or described,
– Can be georeferenced, and
– Can be assigned a time (interval) at which it is/was
present
• Phenomena come as triplets (description,
georeference, time- interval)

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• Water management, the objects of study might
be river basins, agro-ecologic units,
measurements of actual evapotranspiration,
meteorological data, ground water levels,
irrigation levels, water budgets and
measurements of total water use.
• In multipurpose cadastral administration, the
objects of study are houses, land parcels,
streets of various types, land use forms, sewage
canals and other forms of urban infrastructure
may play a role.

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• A simple rule-of-thumb is that natural
geographic phenomena are usually fields, and
man-made phenomena are usually objects.

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 Geographic Field
• A field is a geographic phenomenon that has a value
‘everywhere’ in the study area.
• function f associates a specific value with any position
in the study area
• f(x,y)
• Fields can be discrete or continuous
• Examples of continuous fields are air temperature,
barometric pressure, soil salinity and elevation
• A continuous field can even be differentiable
• if the field is elevation, this measure would be slope

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• Discrete fields divide the study space in
mutually exclusive, bounded parts, with all
locations in one part having the same field
value. Typical examples are land
classifications, for instance, using either
geological classes, soil type, land use type,
crop type or natural vegetation type
• integer raster
• continuous raster

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 Data types and values
• Nominal Data Qualitative Data
• Ordinal Data
• Boolean

• Scalar Data Quantitative Data

– Integers/ numbers
– Real
– Decimal
• Topological

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 Axioms and Procedure for handling
data in IS
• Define some kind of discretization to define the data like point, line, polygon and
pixel.
• All fundamental entities are defined in terms of geographical location.
• Entities are distinguishable by their properties / attributes and geographical
location.
• Both entities and attributes can be classified into categories.
• Boolean algebra can be used to perform logical operation.
• New entities can be create by geometrical union or intersection of existing entities.
• New complex entities can be created with basic data like point, line, polygon and
pixel.
• New attributes can be derived from the existing attributes
• Entities aving certain defined set of attributes may be kept in separate subdata sets
called overlays or data planes.
• Data at some XYZ plane / coordinate can linked to all data planes.
• New attribute at XYZ plane can be defined from a function of the surroundings like
slope, aspect, connectivity

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Data Modelling and Spatial Analysis
• There exist relation in Fundamental Axioms, Data
Model, Data Type and the kind of analysis.

– If location and form of the entity is fixed but the attribute

may change then vector model id appropriate
– If attribute are fixed but entity may change shape and size
but not location then a raster model is appropriate
– If attribute can vary and entity may change location but not
shape and size the object oriented model is appropriate
(having fixed behaviour)
– If entity is not having clear property then treat it as
discretized continuous field.

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 Use of Data Model
• CADASTRE
• Cadastre or Land Registry provides record of divison and ownership of Land.
Important issues are location, area, parcel boundaries. Vector model works
well using nominal, integer and real data type.

• UTILITY Networks
• Utility network is the generic term for the collections of pipes and wires that
link the houses of consumers to the supplies of water, gas, electricity,
telephone, cable television to national or regional suppliers and also to the
waste water disposal systems of drains and sewers.

• All these requirements can be incorporated in a data model of topologically

connected lines (entities) that are described by attributes.

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 Use of Data Model
• Land cover databases
• National and international governments are interested in the division of the
landscape according to classes of land cover—urban areas, arable crops,
grassland, forest, waterbodies, coasts, mountains, etc.

• The simplest data model assumes that the classes are crisp and mutually
exclusive and that there is a direct relation between the class and its location
on the ground. If this is acceptable then one can use the simple polygon
primitives as a model

• If we use remotely sensed data to identify land cover then we automatically

work with a gridded discretization of continuous space because that is how the
satellite scanner works. The resolution of our spatial information is limited by
the spatial resolution of the scanner

• The major problem with identifying land cover with remotely sensed data is to
convert the measurements of reflected radiation for each pixel into a
prediction that a given land cover class dominates that cell.

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 Use of Data Model
• Soil maps
• soil maps use the entity data model based on the vector polygon as the
geographical primitive.

• This data model is practical, because it means that simply by locating a site on a
map and determining the mapping unit one can retrieve information on the soil
properties by consulting the survey report. However, the paradigm is scientifically
inadequate because it ignores spatial variation in both soil forming processes and
in the resulting soils.

• The data models for describing soil as a continuous variable are, in principle, very
similar to those used for the hypsometric surface of land elevation. Sets of discrete
contour lines can be used to link zones of equal which leads to the raster model of
space

• Better is to use a data model based on ideas of ‘object orientation’ in which

primitive entities are linked together in functional groups

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 Use of Data Model
• Hydrology
• Hydrological applications require the modelling of the transport of water
and materials over space and time, which can require changes to be
signalled in attributes, and in location and form of critical patterns (e.g.
water bodies).

• A flood may result in the opening up of new channels and the

abandonment of old ones, thereby changing both topology and location.

• The simple entity vector data model of points, lines, and areas is not very
well suited to dealing with hydrological phenomena because changes in
geometry mean changing the coordinate and topological data in polygon
networks, which can involve consider¬ able computation. Better is to use
a data model based on ideas of ‘object orientation’ in which primitive
entities are linked together in functional groups.

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 Nine factors to consider for
SPATIAL ANALYSIS WITH A GIS
1. Is the real world situation/phenomena under study simple or complex?
2. Are the kinds of entities used to describe the situation/phenomena
detailed or generalized?
3. Is the data type used to record attributes Boolean, nominal, ordinal,
integer, real, or topological?
4. Do the entities in the database represent objects that can be described
exactly, or are these objects complex and possibly somewhat vague? Are their
properties exact, deterministic, or stochastic?
5. Do the database entities represent discrete physical things or continuous
fields?
6. Are the attributes of database entities obtained by complete enumeration
or by sampling?
7. Will the database be used for descriptive, administrative, or analytical
purposes?
8. Will the users require logical, empirical, or process-based models to derive
new information from the database and hence make inferences about the
real world?
9. Is the process under consideration static or dynamic?
 Let us Discuss

• The monitoring of vegetation change in

upland areas
 Coordinate systems
• Data usually comprises an array of numbers.
Spatial data is similar, but it also includes
numerical information that allows you to position
it on earth.
• These numbers are part of a coordinate
system that provides a frame of reference for
your data, to locate features on the surface of the
earth, to align your data relative to other data, to
perform spatially accurate analysis, and to create
maps.
• Data is defined in both horizontal and vertical
coordinate systems. Horizontal coordinate
systems locate data across the surface of the
earth, and vertical coordinate systems locate
the relative height or depth of data.
• Horizontal coordinate systems can be of three types:
• geographic, projected, or local.
• You can determine which type of coordinate system your data uses
by examining the layer's properties.
• Geographic coordinate systems (GCS) typically have units in decimal
degrees, measuring degrees of longitude (x-coordinates) and
degrees of latitude (y-coordinates).
• The location of data is expressed as positive or negative numbers:
positive x- and y-values for north of the equator and east of the
prime meridian, and negative values for south of the equator and
west of the prime meridian.
• Spatial data can also be expressed using projected coordinate
systems (PCS). Linear measurements are used for the coordinates
rather than angular degrees.
• Finally, some data may be expressed in a local coordinate system
with a false origin (0, 0 or other values) in an arbitrary location that
can be anywhere on earth.
• Local coordinate systems are often used for large-scale (small area)
mapping.
• Vertical coordinate systems are either gravity-
based or ellipsoidal.
• Gravity-based vertical coordinate systems
reference a mean sea level calculation.
• Ellipsoidal coordinate systems reference a
mathematically derived spheroidal or
ellipsoidal volumetric surface.
 Projections

• A projection is the means by which you display the

coordinate system and your data on a flat surface, such as a
piece of paper or a digital screen.
• Mathematical calculations are used to convert the
coordinate system used on the curved surface of earth to
one for a flat surface.
• Since there is no perfect way to transpose a curved surface
to a flat surface without some distortion, various map
projections exist that provide different properties.
• There are more than 4,000 coordinate systems in the
ArcGIS platform
• The map projection contains the mathematical calculations
that convert the geodetic locations to the planar system.
• Transformations
• After defining the coordinate system that
matches your data, you may still want to use
data in a different coordinate system.
• This is when transformations are useful.
• Transformations convert data between
different geographic coordinate systems or
between different vertical coordinate systems
 Geographic Objects
• objects are usually easily distinguished
and named, and their position in space
is determined by a combination of one
or more of the following parameters:
– Location (where is it?),
– Shape (what form is it?),
– Size (how big is it?), and
– Orientation (in which direction is it facing?).

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 Crisp and Fuzzy Boundaries
• A crisp boundary is one that can be determined
with almost arbitrary precision, dependent only
on the data acquisition technique applied.
• Fuzzy boundaries contrast with crisp boundaries
in that the boundary is not a precise line, but
rather itself an area of transition.
• crisp boundaries are more common in man-made
phenomena, whereas fuzzy boundaries are more
common with natural phenomena.

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Geographic Information Technologies
• Global Positioning Systems (GPS)
– a system of earth-orbiting satellites which can provide
precise (100 meter to sub-cm.) location on the earth’s
surface (in lat/long coordinates or equiv.)
• Remote Sensing (RS)
– use of satellites or aircraft to capture information
about the earth’s surface
– Digital ortho images a key product (map accurate
digital photos)
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
– Software systems with capability for input, storage,
manipulation/analysis and output/display of
geographic (spatial) information
 Spatial and Attribute Data
• Spatial data (where)
– specifies location
– stored in a shape file, geodatabase or similar
geographic file

• Attribute (descriptive) data (what, how much,

when)
– specifies characteristics at that location, natural or
human-created
– stored in a data base table

• GIS systems traditionally maintain spatial and

attribute data separately, then “join” them for
display or analysis
 Projection, Scale, Accuracy and Resolution
the key properties of spatial data
• Projection: the method by which the curved 3-D surface of the
earth is represented by X,Y coordinates on a 2-D flat map/screen
– distortion is inevitable

• Scale: the ratio of distance on a map to the equivalent distance on

the ground
– in theory GIS is scale independent but in practice there is an implicit range
of scales for data output in any project

• Accuracy: how well does the database info match the real world
– Positional: how close are features to their real world location?
– Consistency: do feature characteristics in database match those in real world
• is a road in the database a road in the real world?
– Completeness: are all real world instances of features present in the database?
• Are all roads included.

• Resolution: the size of the smallest feature able to be recognized

– for raster data, it is the pixel size
 Map Projection
• Location of map features are based on a
coordinate system whereas the location of
spatial features are based on geographic grid
expressed in latitude and longitude values.
• The transformation from the geographic grid
to a coordinate system is called map
projection.
• Map layers used must be based on the same
coordinate system.

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• When maps are not of same coordinate systems
, processing is required.
• Processing means projection and re-projection.
• Projection means converting digital maps from
latitude – longitude values to 2 dimensional
coordinates system.
• Re-projection means converting from one
coordinate system to another.
• Every Map preserves some spatial properties
and sacrifice other properties.

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 Geographic Grid
• GG is a location reference system for spatial features on the Earth’s
surface.
• GG consist of meridians and parallels
• Meridians are lines of longitude for E-W directions (prime meridian, 0-
180 Degrees)
• Parallels are lines of latitude for N-S directions (Equator, 0-90 Degrees)
• The geographic grid of Spherical Earth’s surface is similar to a plane
coordinate system.
• (0,0) is represented where prime meridian meets equator
• Longitude – X values, Latitude – Y values
• Eastern Hemisphere – positive values
• Western Hemisphere – negative values
• North of equator - positive values
• South of equator – negative values
• Measured in degree-minute-second (DMS) / decimal degrees (DD)
systems
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 Map Projection
• Map projection is the transformation of the spherical
Earth’s surface to a Plane Surface.
• The outcome of this transformation is a systematic
construction of lines on a plane surface representing the
geographic grid.
• Two dimensional coordinates rather than spherical or three
dimensional coordinates.
• cos D = sin a sin b + cos b cos c
• D is distance b/w A and B, a is latitude at A, b is latitude at
B, c is difference in Longitude of A and B
• Length of one degree at the equator = 111.32 kms/ 69.17
miles
• Transformation from earth’s surface to flat surface involves
distortion and no projection is perfect.

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Cartographer’s Map Projection Classification
based on their preserved properties
• Conformal
– Preserves Local Shapes
• Equal area / equivalent
– Area in correct relative size
• Equidistant
– Consistency of scale for certain distances
• Azimuthal / true direction
– Retains accurate directions

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• Conformal and Equivalent properties are
mutually exclusive
• These are global properties – applied to
entire Map projection.
• Equidistant and Azimuthal properties are
local properties
• May be true only for from or to the centre of
map projection.

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How map projection constructed?
• Various projections are used to represent
the curved surface of the Earth to the
plane surface of a map.
• The three transformations are:
• Cylindrical Projection:
– Using Cylinder (projection surface)
• Conic projection:
– Using Cone
• Azimuthal Projection:
– Using Plane

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Cylindrical projection

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Conical projection

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Azimuthal projection

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• Use of geometric objects explain two other
concepts in map projections
– Case
• Simple case (one line of tangency) and secant case
(two lines of tangency)
• Cylindrical and conical projections have one line of
tangency and two lines of tangency in simple and
secant cases respectively.
• Azimuthal projection has point of tangency in
simple case and a line of tangency in secant case
– Aspects
• Aspects describes the placement of a geometric
objects relative to a globe
• A plane may be tangent at any point on the globe

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Cases

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 Aspects

Polar aspect – refers to tangency at Poles

Equatorial aspect – refers to tangency at Equator
Oblique Aspect – refers to anywhere between the equator and pole

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• Case relates directly to the standard line in Map
Projection
– Refers to the line of tangency between the projection
surface and the reference Globe.
– For cylindrical and conic cases,
• the standard line is called standard parallel if it follows a
parallel
• And Standard Meridian if it follows a meridian
There is no projection distortion along standard line because it
has same scale as that of reference globe.
Standard line has scale factor of 1.

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 Scale Factor
• Ratio of the local scale to the scale of the
reference globe or the principal globe
• Degree of projection distortion increases away
from the standard line
• Central line and standard lines are different
• Standard lines indicate the distribution
pattern of projection distortion
• Centre line defines centre or origin of map
projection
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 Projection Surface

a b c Earth’s srface

Scale Factor
a = 1.0
b= 0.99
c= 1.0
Central meridan is at b

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• The centre of Map Projection is defined by the central Parallel and
central Meridians

• To avoid having negative coordinates, GIS can make use of False

Easting or False Northing
• Move the origin to the SW corner
• So that all points fall in NE quadrant and have positive values
• Coordinates based on false origin have very large numbers, to
preserve data precision, x-shift and y-shift values applied to all
coordinates readings

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 Geo Referencing

• Advantages:
– It covers entire Earth
– Can be transformed to Cartesian coordinate
• Disadvantage:
– The elevation reference system is not same as
for normal national elevation system

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Commonly used Map Projections
• Transverse Mercator
– cylindrical., standard Meridian
• Lambert Conformal Conic
– Secant projection, first and second standard parallels,
central meridian, latitude of projections origin, false
easting and false northing
• Albers Equal Area Conic
– Equal Area
• Equidistant Conic
– Equidistant

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 Spheroid and Datum
• A spheroid is a model that approximates the earth.
• Also called Ellipsoid
• Due to irregularities or mass anomalies in the
distribution of the ‘global ocean’ results in an
undulated surface. This surface is called the Geoid
• Has major axis at equator and minor axis at poles
• Datum is a mathematical model serves as the reference
base to calculate the geographical coordinates of a
location.
• Relationship between earth and spheroid is defined
through a Datum.

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• Clarke 1866 (united states, equatorial radius
and polar radius)
• NAD 27 ( North American datum of 1927,
centre at Meades Ranch, Kansas)
• WGS 84 World Geodetic System 1984
• GRS 80 Geodetic Reference system 1980
• NAD 83
• Horizontal shift from NAD 27 to NAD 83

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 Coordinate Systems
• Coordinate systems are used to locate data either
on the Earth’s surface in a 3D space, or on the
Earth’s reference surface (ellipsoid or sphere) in a
2D space.
• 2D Geographic coordinates (φ, λ)
• 3D Geographic coordinates (φ, λ, h)
• 3D Geocentric coordinates (X, Y, Z)
• 2D Cartesian coordinates (X, Y )
• 2D Polar coordinates (α, d)

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 2D Geographic coordinates (φ, λ)
• The most widely used global coordinate
system consists of lines of geographic latitude
(phi or φ or ϕ) and longitude (lambda or λ).

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 3D Geographic coordinates (φ, λ, h)
• 3D geographic coordinates (φ, λ, h) are
obtained by introducing the ellipsoidal height
h to the system. The ellipsoidal height (h) of a
point is the vertical distance of the point
above the ellipsoid.

93
3D Geocentric coordinates (X, Y, Z)
• The system has its origin at the mass-centre of
the Earth with the X and Y axes in the plane of
the equator. The X-axis passes through the
meridian of Greenwich, and the Z-axis
coincides with the Earth’s axis of rotation. The
three axes are mutually orthogonal and form a
right-handed system. Geocentric coordinates
can be used to define a position on the surface
of the Earth

95
 2D Cartesian coordinates (X, Y )
• A flat map has only two dimensions: width
(left to right) and length (bottom to top).
Transforming the three dimensional Earth into
a two-dimensional map is subject of map
projections and coordinate transformations
• Two-dimensional Cartesian coordinates (x, y),
also known as planar rectangular coordinates

97
 2D Polar coordinates (α, d)
• Defining a point in a plane is by polar
coordinates. This is the distance d from the
origin to the point concerned and the angle α
between a fixed (or zero) direction and the
direction to the point. The angle α is called
Bearing or azimuth.
• Azimuth or bearing and is measured in a
clockwise direction.

99
 Coordinate transformations

• Transformations may be done on the basis of

a set of selected points whose coordinates are
known in both systems. These points are
ground control points (GCPs) or common
points such as corners of houses or road
intersections, etc.
 2D Polar to 2D Cartesian
Transformations
The transformation of polar coordinates (α, d), into
Cartesian map coordinates (x, y) is done when field
measurements, angular and distance measurements are
transformed into map coordinates. The equation for this
transformation is:
• x = d(sin(a))
• y = d(cos(a))

• The inverse equation is:

• a = tan−1(x/y)
• d2 = x2 + y2
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