GISC 6387
GIS Workshop
Dr. Ronald Briggs
UT-Dallas
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Goal of the GIS Workshop
• Each student independently designs and conducts a
GIS-based project
– develops and demonstrates his/her competence in using GIS
techniques in a substantive application area
• Project plan
– Due within the first two weeks of the semester
• Midterm progress report
– and comments/suggestions on other student’s projects in your
session
• Final in-class project presentation, together with webenabled final report
– and evaluation of all other student’s projects
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Project Plan should explain:
• the scope and objective of the project
• the data to be used, and its source(s)
• the processing, programming, and/or
analysis to be applied to the data in order
to meet the objective; and
• the results and conclusions you expect
I need this by e-mail within two weeks!
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Midterm Presentations should:
• explain your project and its objectives
• summarize key relevant literature and/or
describe similar projects already conducted
• describes the data and methodology that you
are using to meet your objectives
• detail progress and successes to date
• discuss problems encountered and how they
have been or will be overcome
• provide preliminary results/outputs, if available.
• overview work still needed to complete the
project.
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The final in-class presentation
Should be modeled as a report to your project sponsor (the
person footing the bill!) which:
• explains the project and its objectives
• summarizes relevant literature and/or similar existing
projects
• describes the data and analysis used to meet these
objectives
• discusses problems encountered and how they were
overcome
• presents and summarizes results and outputs
• draws final conclusions based on project objectives
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The final deliverables must include:
• a report documenting the project
– as a Word document with all graphics and supporting
materials internal to that document
– or, as a WWW site with all file references relative to
the internal file structure of the CD,
• any GIS data sets, computer programs, ArcGIS
scripts or databases resulting from the project.
Students with superior projects will be urged to
make a presentation at the South Central Arc
Users Group conference (usually in February).
All projects will be placed on the UTD GIS web site
unless there are proprietary issues.
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Evaulation of Presentations
You must also submit, via e-mail to me
• comments and suggestions on all student’s
midterm presentations
– Identification information will be removed and the
comments distributed to all class members
• an evaluation of final student presentations.
– identify and rank order the five strongest reports
(1=strongest) and briefly justify their selection and
– identify and rank order the five weakest reports
(1=weakest) and briefly justify their selection.
(In other words, identify the people you would, and would
not, hire to do your GIS project!)
Multiple presentation sessions will likely be scheduled. You are
required to attend at least two. Ranks should combine
presentations in both sessions.
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Project Types
• GIS data set generation
– Often conducted for some organization (city, etc.) for the purpose of
representing and describing features of the real world which are
relevant to that organization’s mission
– For the GIS Workshop must go beyond repetitive ‘grunt’ work to include
some innovative element
• involves unique challenges and thus not commonly collected
• data collection automation
• analysis of resulting data
• GIS technology exploration and/or tool development
– In depth exploration of an existing technology, including implementation
• what it does, how it works, how and when you use it
– Developing a better technology
• Automation or software tool development
• Spatial Analysis
– Describing spatial patterns and understanding the underlying
processes
– Normally approached by
• advancing hypotheses derived from the literature of existing research,
• designing a project to test them, which is mindful of the “pitfalls of spatial
analysis” (see spatanal.ppt from GISC 6382)
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All requirements set out here are based on
The Components of An Analysis
as discussed in GISC 6382 and 6384
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Objective, which explains the purpose of the analysis and explains why
it is significant, possibly including
– Hypotheses, which are potential explanations which you intend to test
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Literature Review, which identifies the key pieces of existing research
relevant to the project and the hypotheses you have advanced
Data Sources, which identify and explain the data used.
Analysis and Methodology, which explains the methodology applied to
the data.
Results and Discussion, which describes your main research findings,
whether or not your hypotheses were upheld, and any potential
problems with your interpretation of the results
Conclusions, which discusses the implications of your finding relative to
your initial project objective.
References, which provides standard format citations for all resources
drawn upon for the project.
See: http://www.utdallas.edu/~briggs/poec6382/spatanal.ppt
For even more detail, go to:
http://www.utdallas.edu/~briggs/poec6389/gisc6389_contents.doc
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Literature Reviews
• All research and analysis should build upon
the existing base of knowledge
• It is imperative that you identify the existing
state of knowledge in order to
– Establish appropriate objectives
– Advance meaningful hypotheses
– Select and use legitimate methodologies
• This is accomplished by reviewing the
existing literature
• On scientific knowledge published in refereed journals
• On best practices by other organizations
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Doing a Literature Review
Doing a standard Google search is not sufficient! Instead, use Google Scholar
• http://scholar.google.com/
If you access Google Scholar from on-campus via the UTD Library web page at
• http://www.utdallas.edu/library/
it will give you automatic access to materials subscribed to by UTD library (very clever!)
For information on how to configure Google Scholar to access UTD library materials from offcampus, go to
• http://www.utdallas.edu/library/howto/GoogleScholarPage.htm
This site also gives guidelines on when to use bibliographic databases in place of Google
Scholar
Databases available at UTD for literature searches, covering both citations and complete text,
can be found at:
• http://www.utdallas.edu/library/collections/dbases.htm
The single most commonly used bibliographic database is probably “Web of Science” at
• http://www.utdallas.edu/library/collections/dbUZ.htm
Or directly at
• http://isi10.isiknowledge.com/portal.cgi?DestApp=WOS&Func=Frame
For information on accessing these library databases from off-campus, go to:
• http://www.utdallas.edu/library/howto/access.htm
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Because of licensing restrictions, you will need to follow these instructions for off-campus access
How to Format Citations
• It is important that you learn to use the correct format when
citing literature
• Doing a copy/paste of a URL, which may be gone
tomorrow, is not sufficient!
• The Chicago Manual of Style is the accepted norm.
The Chicago Manual of Style. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 15th ed., 2003
– Or replicate the format used by any mainline GIS journal
• A nice summary is available at:
– http://www.libs.uga.edu/ref/chicago.html
– Or , http://library.osu.edu/sites/guides/chicagogd.php
– Use it!!!!
• For presentations, include the full citation on slides where
you reference the item, in addition to having them in your
list of references at the end. A person reading can "flip to
the end" to check a reference, but the listener cannot do that
with a presentation!
You must format citations according to the Chicago Manual of Style or similar!
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And now to your projects….
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