18-Geom-A7 Geospatial Information Systems · December 2015
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
National Exams — December 2015 — 04-Geom-A7 Geospatial Information Systems. Closed-book; an approved Casio or Sharp calculator is permitted. Format: twelve short-answer questions of varying value totalling 100 marks; all questions constitute a complete exam and are solved in full below. Datum and coordinate conventions follow the Canadian spatial reference framework — NAD83(CSRS) horizontally and CGVD2013 vertically.
Reference texts: P. A. Longley, M. F. Goodchild, D. J. Maguire & D. W. Rhind, Geographic Information Systems and Science (4th ed., Wiley, 2015); P. Bolstad, GIS Fundamentals: A First Text on Geographic Information Systems (6th ed., XanEdu, 2019); P. A. Burrough, R. A. McDonnell & C. D. Lloyd, Principles of Geographical Information Systems (3rd ed., Oxford, 2015); M. Worboys & M. Duckham, GIS: A Computing Perspective (2nd ed., CRC, 2004); J. P. Snyder, Map Projections — A Working Manual (USGS PP 1395); ISO 19115 Geographic information — Metadata.
Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.
Computer-based GISs are justified wherever decisions depend on location and on combining many spatial datasets. Five representative applications are: (1) Land and cadastral administration — maintaining the parcel fabric, ownership, zoning and assessment records, and supporting subdivision approval and property taxation; the volume of parcels and their linkage to legal attributes make manual maps impractical. (2) Utility and infrastructure asset management — inventorying and analysing water, sewer, gas, electrical and telecom networks, supporting maintenance, outage tracing and capital planning through network topology. (3) Emergency management and public safety — flood, wildfire and hazard modelling, evacuation routing, and computer-aided dispatch that finds the nearest available responder along the road network. (4) Natural-resource and environmental management — forest inventory, watershed and habitat analysis, environmental-impact assessment and monitoring land-cover change from satellite imagery over time. (5) Transportation and infrastructure planning — route optimization, pavement-management systems, traffic and transit modelling, and corridor selection. Other equally justifiable examples include retail site selection and market analysis, epidemiology and public-health surveillance, precision agriculture, and urban and regional planning. Each is justified because the problem is inherently spatial, involves large multi-layer datasets, and benefits from the query, overlay and analysis capabilities that only a GIS provides.
