Creating GIS basis for excavations – Part 2

(Organisers: Willem BEEX / Benno RIDDERHOF, The Netherlands)

Your drawings have been vectorized. Your written data has been stored in a database or something comparable. You are now ready to enter GIS. But what is GIS? It is a method to combine written and drawn data to take the first step towards analysis.

But there are rules. What can be and what can’t be imported in GIS. Why do I need to know about projections? What can and can’t be compared in GIS. What are the rules when you use qualitative data in a quantitative environment? What are the rules when you compare quantitative data in GIS? What do the preliminary results say? How do you represent them?
This workshop aims to answer these questions by presenting a general overview of the possibilities and non possibilities of the GIS-program MapInfo.

The workshop is divided into two parts:

The first part of the workshop consists of a lecture outlining the background needed to work in GIS. (Projection, trigonometry, statistics) This will take about two hours.
During the second part of the workshop participants will work with the material of the large-scale roman/ medieval excavation Dorestad. The participants will learn to import drawn and written data in a GIS-environment and combine them for further investigation. The combined data will be subjected to questions by using the SQL engine of MapInfo. Emphasis will be laid on good and wrong questions and recognizing them.

People who want to follow this workshop need an understanding of Databases, some statistics and basic vectorization. As this workshop is the sequel of the workshop given last year, those who have participated in that workshop will have preference.