Knowledge Base Resources

Geocoding is the process of taking a street address and converting it into coordinates that can be plotted on a map. This conversion typically requires an API call to a remote server hosted by an organization/institution. The remote server will take the address attributes provided by you and the remote server will compare it to the data it contains and return a best estimate on the coordinates for that location. There are many geocoding services available with different world coverages, quality of result, and set different rate limits for access. For R, a package called "tidygeocoder" provides an easy way to connect to these different services. As an additional benefit, their documentation provides a good summary of geocoding services available and links to their documentation. The link to the documentation for gecoding services accessible by "tidygeocoder" is provided below. For Python, geopy package is a library that provides connection to various geocoding services. The link to the documentation for this package is also included below.

In GIS, projections are helpful to take something plotted on a globe and convert it to a flat map that we can print or show on a screen. Unfortunately it also introduces distortions to the objects and features on the map. This not only distorts the objects visually, but the results for any spatial attribute calculations will also reflect this distortion (such as distance and area ). Below is a link to a quick primer on projections, types of distortions that can occur, and suggestions on how to choose a correct projection for your work.

Spatial Data Science is a growing field across a wide range of industries and disciplines. The open-source programming language Python has many libraries that support spatial analysis, but what do you do when your computer is unable to tackle the massive file sizes of high-resolution data and the computing power required in your analysis? There materials have been prepared to teach you spatial data science and how to execute your analysis using a high-performance computer (HPC).

Running QGIS tools from the command line

Often when working with GIS, or spatial data, one encounters the word "datum" and it may require that you choose a "datum" when doing GIS computation tasks. Below is a short video on what are datums from NOAA and UCAR.

Multi-threading guidance when using GDAL.

Hour of Cyberinfrastructure (Hour of CI) is a nationwide campaign to introduce undergraduate and graduate students to cyberinfrastructure and geographic information science (GIS).

Techniques and support for multithreaded geospatial data processing in GRASS.