Course Reflection

The course emphasized the importance of defining the problem, getting the data and analyzing using a GIS software, to solve spatial problems and present the results. The spatial problems span from conservation to business needs. One key feature is the application of each concept in another area.

The main takeaways are:

1. Different GIS software have different navigating and editing system but they should yield the same results. Sometimes, they do not perform as expected so care must be exercised to double check the results.

2. Real world problems , their data can sometimes be tricky to find and download. And even when data becomes available, prepping them for GIS use require skill and experience.

3. It is not enough to find clustering and dispersion in the spatial data but also their statistical significance. This gives confidence to the result of the analysis.

4. The advantage of using rasters over vector data for suitability analysis because it allows degrees of suitability resulting in a number of choices rather than an accept/reject option.

5. The Fuzzy Overlay with the Fuzzy membership tool. This concept introduces possibility into the analysis which categorizes each data set in a membership(ratio) scale of 0 to 1. This is different from the Weighted Overlay which categorizes each data set in an ordinal scale, such scales do not have continuum .