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Experiential Learning Portfolio Guide Professional Experience – Supporting Introduction to GIS

Fundamental GIS Theories and Concepts
The fundamental theories and concepts of GIS have challenged myself and prior Geospatial Program
Mangers with the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and driven our decision-making process. I
have learned through education along the way that Geographic Information Systems and Geographic
Information Sciences are two very different concepts, although both are required to create an efficient
programmatic workflow for a problem solving organization.

GIS as a system allows the end user to process data from various sources that may include: raster,
vector, and attribute. and present this information to support ideas and/or problems representative of
the data and information that was collected as a whole (Goodchild, 1992). The basic elements of a GIS
are people, data, software, hardware and methods. This creates a holistic system that allows for data
collection, storing/processing and analysis, and finally output visualization.
GIS as a science can be considered a framework for information theory, spatial analysis and statistics
along with cognitive understanding, and cartography (Longley, Goodchild, Maguire, Rhind, 2005). The
science creates a path for the analyst to use as they process the information and start investigating
spatial patterns, observations and answers to explain various conditions.
I have successfully implemented both GIS as a system and followed scientific principles to learn/
understand how environmental forces impact navigation and the Texas Coast. I have utilized my
knowledge of ESRI desktop products over the years to provide my organization with informative
products backed by the use of scientific principles to assist decision makers. I extremely lucky to had
an opportunity to learn all the aspects of GIS and progress from an analyst to the District’s Geospatial
Program Manager within my 26-year career with USACE.

Applying Basic Cartographic Principles

I found myself learning ArcView 3.1 and trying to develop products that would take raw data and convey
information to others through maps, tables and charts. I realized early that the District was utilizing a
CADD platform to create maps and mapping products that would be better suited in a GIS environment.
So, I started creating plan and profile sheets and location maps of various projects using cartographic
techniques to ensure proper scaling, north arrow placement, and coordinate grids manually for each
drawing. I also started creating GIS products by exporting Bentley Microstation and Bentley Map files
into ArcView and converting them to shapefiles to create points, lines and polygon features for analysis.
The features were created from digitized USGS quad maps utilizing large digitizing boards. The
process was tedious and involved knowing how to locate the correct state plane zones and tick-marks
for the proper grids that corresponded to the desired projection, in this case State Plane Texas South-
Central NAD27 and State Plane Texas South NAD27 for our regions area of interest. This provided
the horizontal control or rectification needed based on four to five reference points in the grid to provide
decent accuracy for analysis to proceed. I began relying heavily on datasets that had well documented
metadata to support projections and coordinate systems, since it was often necessary to reproject and
transform these datasets into a single projection for use with our internal data.

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