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GIS/QGIS intro exercise

GDES-396 spring 2020 (David Ramos, American University Design)
ramos@american.edu · office hours

Four ways of looking at a college campus

  1. University and College Campuses on DC Open Data (look at the site and download a shapefile)
  2. Manually digitized building footprints for D.C. (ZIP)1
  3. 2016 NAIP aerial photographs, north and south (JPEG2000)2
  4. AI-generated building footprints for D.C. (ZIP)3

Build a map on your own

As an exercise, produce a map showing a few geographic features in DC. Work with one of the following datasets, all from Open Data DC. (You will want to download data in shapefile format.)

Think about the nature of the data (point, polyline, or polygon); strokes and fills; color (hue, saturation, lightness, and opacity); and layer order. You can add labels, though they might not be appropriate.

  1. DC Open Data, based on 2015/2017 imagery ↩

  2. Downloaded from USGS National Map site. Metadata: north/south.) ↩

  3. Microsoft, based on aerial imagery of variable age ↩