A GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM (GIS) is the system used to describe

geographical surface of the earth for the purpose of visualizing and analysing geographically
referenced information.
What is Geographic Data?
Geographic data is simply a collection of information that can describe objects and things
with relation to space. For e.g. Geographic data can be used to determine a variety of
characteristics of a population.
Types of Geographic Data
For GIS the Geographic Data inputs are of two types:
Spatial Data
Attribute Data
Spatial data is the data or information that identifies the geographic location of features and
boundaries on Earth, such as natural or constructed features, oceans, and more.
Attribute data is the tabular or textual data describing the geographic characteristics of
features. For instance, the spatial data might represent a county and contain information for
city boundaries, census tract boundaries, streets, and so forth. An attribute data set with
population information for each census tract can be linked to a map by the corresponding
tract value in the spatial data.
Representation of Spatial data in GIS
Spatial data are represented in GIS in two formats
Raster datasets (Imagery).
Vector datasets (Features [collections of points, lines, and polygons])
Imagery
Imagery in GIS often refers pixel-based data sourcesfor satellites, aerial photography,
digital elevation models, raster datasets, and so on. Imagery is managed as a raster data type
composed of cells organized in a grid of rows and columns.
There are different ways in which your raster and image data may be supported in ArcGIS: as
a raster dataset which is derived from a storage format (for e.g. ASCII Grid; Tagged Image
File Format (TIFF), Erdas Imagine), as a raster product which is derived from specific
metadata files (GeoEye satellite, IKONOS satellite, Landsat satellites etc).
Featurespoints, lines, and polygons
Geographic features are most commonly represented as points, lines, or polygons.
Points (For e.g. well locations, telephone poles, mountain peaks etc.)
Lines (For e.g. roads, streams etc.).
Polygons (For e.g. states, soil types, land-use zones etc.)

Shapefile is a way of storing points, lines and polygon features inside a file in ArcGIS.The
shapefile format defines the geometry and attributes of geographically referenced features in
three or more files with specific file extensions that should be stored in the same project
workspace.

Representation of Attribute data in GIS

In a GIS, descriptive attributes are managed in tables. Attribute tables provide a simple,
universal data model for storing and working with attribute information.Tables contain rows
and columns. Each column has a type, such as integer, decimal number, character, and date.
Representation of data in ArcGIS
ArcGIS models geographic information as a logical set of layers or themes. Map layers are
thematic representations of geographic information. Within each map layer, symbols, colors,
and text are used to portray important information that describes each of the individual
geographic elements.

Digitization
Digitizing is the process of interpreting and converting paper map or image data to vector
digital data. In manual digitizing you trace the lines or points from the source media. You
control a cursor, usually with a mouse, and sample vertices to define the point, line, or
polygonal features you wish to capture. The source media may be hardcopy, e.g., maps taped
to a digitizing table, or softcopy, e.g., a digital image or scanned map.

OBJECTIVES:
The objectives of this exercise are to:
Digitize point, line and polygon in ArcMap

EXERCISE 2: LAB ASSSIGNMENT TASK

Q1. Prepare a layout map with all map elements showing some points, lines and polygon
features in the toposheet (lab2.jpg).
Note: (At-least 5 features in each category should be digitized)