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Introduction to Geoinformatics

Professor: Gilberto Câmara

Course Objective

The course “Introduction to Geoinformatics” is focused on presenting the foundational ideas of the discipline of Geoinformatics. We take a realist perspective, and ask ourselves the question: What are the different types of geographical data, and how are these types representable in computers?.

What we call “geographical data” includes different kinds of data. We observe the natural world when we get data about topography, landscapes, the oceans and the atmosphere. Sometimes we represent data from nature as a continuous variation, as when we build digital terrain models. In other situations, we give names to natural features, as when we say “Mont Blanc”. We also create geographical reality, as when we draw boundaries of countries and of land parcels. We also measure facts of the social world, when we take a census and locate crimes. We also build continuous distributions out of social reality, e.g., when we create maps of disease incidence in a country. We also observe and detect change in the geographical world, as when we map new deforested areas.

The beauty and the challenge of Geoinformatics is that there are a relatively small set of data structures that are able to represent different types of geographical data. This representational power has enabled software engineers to develop the technology of geographical information systems. The challenge is to understand both the data structures and the semantics of the information they represent. This course is then focused on discussing the semantics of geographical data, as well as the links between such semantics and the associated computer representation. When they complete the course, we expect that students should be able to understand the different types of geographical data and how they are represented in computers.


The motivation for this course came from the need to establish a set of foundational concepts to the field of Geoinformatics. In recent years, there has been a significant contribution to this foundation from research published the world of Werner Kuhn, who published an important paper on “Core Concepts of Geographical Information Science”. His idea is that there are some concepts need to be understood by all researchers and practitioners of Geoinformatics.


The course is organized on the following main topics:

  1. What is Geoinformatics? General definitions. Linking computer representations to geographical data. General examples.
  2. Representing the world: putting the Earth into a computer. Location as a key property of the world.
  3. Representing the social world, part I: generation geographical reality with our laws and social arrangements. The role of boundaries. Creating (fiat) objects. The need for maintaining identity of objects of the social world.
  4. Geometries for representing the social world: points, lines and polygons. Topological relations.
  5. Describing the natural world, part I: assigning names, identities and (bona fide) boundaries to places and features of the world and to living beings. The inherent ambiguity of “places”.
  6. Describing the natural world, part 2: measuring properties of the world as continuous distributions. Fields as a general data type for measuring the world.
  7. Representing the social world, part 2: creating continuous representations from object data. Data structures for continuous representations of data.
  8. Describing change: the concepts of trajectories, moving objects, and events.



Main references

Additional references

Course 2014

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