The Top Five Skills Needed to Have a Successful GIS Career

The Top Five Skills Needed to Have a Successful GIS Career
Tuesday, September 13th 2011
2 Comments and 24 Reactions
By Joe Francica, Adena Schutzberg
Read More About: GEOGRAPHIC DATA, GEOSPATIAL TECHNOLOGY, GIS SOFTWARE PRODUCTS, INTERNETWEB MAPPINGWEB SERVICES, OPEN SOURCE
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Summary:
In the “Directions on the News” podcast for September 13th, our editors each list the top five skills they believe an individual should possess in order to have a successful career in GIS technology. This article looks at the reasons our editors give for the individual skills that they suggest.

Our editors offer their suggestions to those looking to enhance their career in GIS by listing the top five skills they believe those individuals should possess. Editor in Chief Joe Francica and Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg take slightly different approaches to this task and they provide a brief explanation of their top picks here. You may also listen to their podcast. Grateful acknowledgement is extended to Dr. Joseph Kerski at Esri for starting this discussion, as he articulated his top five skills in a recent blog post.

From Adena Schutzberg
Teach yourself new procedures/workflows/software: Even if the organization for which you work uses the same software year to year, it will change. You should be able to learn and take advantage of what's new. More likely, you will be asked to learn new tools to work alongside or replace existing ones. Be ready to learn those too! (Homework to work on this skill: Teach yourself to use an open source GIS product.)

Work in a team: GIS professionals rarely work alone. Even in a "one person" shop you will be working alongside clients and partners as a team. Be ready to use the skills of each team member to ensure everyone contributes. Sometimes the best contribution is simply getting coffee! (Homework: Volunteer to help with a local event like a running race or food drive.)

Act (research/read/learn/explore/contribute) based on your curiosity/responsibility: If a topic or technology related to your current work is interesting, don't just say, "Oh, that's interesting!" Go learn more about it on your own, or if you are lucky, on the company's time. Then, give a lunchtime talk on what you learned. Keep an eye out for resources on the Web, at conferences and local presentations on what interests you. (Homework: Set up an automated search of the Web for topics in which you have an interest.)

Find a/several mentor(s): Part of your job is to continue learning about the field and how to be successful in it. Find individuals who can help you do this. They might be your peers, your supervisors or even other people's supervisors. They may even be people outside your organization. (Homework: Consider the people in the business world that you know and respect. Ask one to be your mentor and meet for coffee or on the phone four times a year to strategize how to be successful in your position or get to the next one.)

Confidently communicate orally, in writing, in graphic form, in front of an audience, on video, via Twitter, etc.: Our field (like many) relies on all kinds of communication. Hone your skills and get comfortable with the new technologies available to share your ideas. (Homework: From the content you found and explored in #3, offer to give a "brown bag" talk to your team or a class, or produce a YouTube video to share.)

From Joe Francica
Three Basic Skills

Programmatic skills: Prepare your mind for spatial thinking – take a course in basic computer programming. Programming prepares your mind for logical thinking; it prepares you to think through a process that provides an end result. Structured query language (SQL) provides the syntax that underpins spatial queries so that the geospatial analyst can think through the process of creating and producing the expected outcome. That outcome is a map that provides the analyst with a spatial perspective that reveals geospatial information.

Problem solving skills: Take a course in calculus. Math is about problem solving. It’s about arranging parameters in a sequence to answer a question. The geospatial analyst will find it necessary to seek the parameters that apply to his/her particular problem. Choose wisely and the end result will be a satisfying analysis. Calculus prepares the mind to think about the sequential nature of problem solving.

Spatial thinking skills: Understand the spatial perspective by taking a course in photography. Spatial thinking is driven by understanding the juxtaposition of objects to one another. Understanding the elements of photography prepares the mind to see “space.” When a photographer prepares to take a picture, she must compose a shot that includes many spatially-related elements in a manner that will make a good picture. Good photographers do this naturally by building their skills within a variety of constraints: geography, lighting and the confines allowed by the lens all create limitations similar to those within which the geospatial analyst must work.

Two Advanced Skills
Be an expert in one specific discipline: Knowing how to push the right buttons in a GIS software package may win you kudos from your colleagues but nothing replaces the knowledge of a domain expert. Whether it’s environmental science or urban planning, the GIS profession needs people who understand professional disciplines so that “GIS as a tool” can be best applied by the person most knowledgeable about the problem at hand.

Communication skills are essential: Why is it so hard to explain GIS to someone who is unfamiliar with the profession? The successful GIS professional needs to communicate the benefits of his toolbox. Anyone can create a map; the geospatial professional creates understanding and communicates a perspective not readily understood by looking at “data” in another form. You can try to understand data by looking at reams of paper… or you can look at one map. The person who shows the world how to communicate with maps will be successful. Jack Dangermond often says that geography and geospatial information are communication by a new type of language. We must then become fluent in this language to communicate in the geospatial dimension.

http://www.directionsmag.com/articles/the-top-five-skills-needed-to-have-a-successful-gis-career/199099

Mostly I've been talking about GEOGRAPHY

หลายปีมานี้ส่วนใหญ่ ผมส่งเมล์ในเรื่อง Geography มากที่ สุด ลองลงมาเรื่อง GIS และ Map และพูดถึง Cartography น้อยที่สุด..

:)

Why Geo Will Embrace The Cloud in 2010

Why Geo Will Embrace The Cloud in 2010
By Brian Timoney , The Timoney Group
February 16, 2010

With all the hype and buzz surrounding "The Cloud" - it has its own IBM commercial! - managers can be forgiven their collective eye-rolling, especially given the long track record of technology fads that have come and gone without finding real-world problems to solve. The difference this time are the variety of cloud-based services coming online in 2010 that directly address the problems that resource-constrained GIS shops face on a daily basis.

IT Is Suffocating GIS
Ask average, ordinary stressed-out GIS managers about their day and the likely response will be a litany of grievances about servers, networks, licenses and unhappy users of Web applications. Note that most of the above have little to do with the traditional responsibilities of GIS departments such as maintaining positional accuracy of spatial data, spatial analysis and cartographic production. Instead, much energy is devoted to maintaining the complex choreography of connectivity between desktop applications, databases, servers and Web portals. With budgetary pressures showing little sign of abating, shops are forced to make difficult trade offs in managing their mix of IT and personnel expenses. The costs of this complexity are significant in ways that are both explicitly financial but also somewhat psychological, as industry veterans lose their enthusiasm under the burden of IT management responsibilities that hold little intrinsic interest.

Meeting Users Where They Live
Cloud services, whether they be disk storage, rentable servers or more recently, non-relational databases (e.g. Amazon’s SimpleDB and Google’s App Engine), have been available for some time, yet a significant amount of know-how is necessary to get going. From comfort with the command-line to programming proficiency, you need chops to get the pieces and parts working together to create an environment productive enough to justify the effort. In short, a number of the headaches of in-house IT seem to have their direct corollaries in the cloud. To be truly effective, cloud solutions need to meet GIS users where they spend most of their time: their desktop.

Rent What You Need; Pay For Only What You Use
In the recent launch of its flagship FME 2010 product, Safe Software stated that the company was aiming to offer the software as a service using Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, which can be purchased in per-hour increments. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) model in the cloud counts among its success stories such familiar Internet offerings as Salesforce.com and Gmail. What’s compelling about such an SaaS offering in geospatial is that there are a number of "every once in a while" tasks for which the usual approach was to buy pricey extensions and/or additional licenses. Now, with a metered model, you can spin up FME instances on Amazon as your tasking warrants and pay for the additional functionality only when you need it.

Databases Without DBAs
While the shapefile chugs along well into its second decade, relational databases (RDBMS) are the preferred repository of spatial data in the enterprise. But along with all the performance and reliability gains of an RDBMS come management overhead. Managing tables and queries, slinging ad hoc SQL, and keeping the database "talking" to both desktop and server all require extra know-how. As mentioned above, both Amazon and Google offer non-relational databases that give up explicit relational structures in exchange for scalability and performance gains. As a plugin to the ArcMap desktop product, the most recent version of Arc2Earth (in beta) transforms Google App Engine into an "always-on" datastore with features directly editable in a familiar desktop environment. Further, Arc2Earth enables the direct publishing of your spatial data out of AppEngine in common formats such as KML, JSON, CSV, etc. Again, you pay for what you use - for both storage and CPU time. For many small- and medium-sized shops this combination of an online spatial database and publishing platform will yield monthly bills that will strain to exceed a few dollars.

Taming the Chaos of the Shared Drive
Once, while I was pitching a Web mapping solution, an enthusiastic listener inquired whether my proposed interface would work with the company’s image server. "Why sure, if you can already publish your imagery via a standard such as WMS, we can stream that to the interface, no problem," I confidently stated. Later, when chatting with the department head, I mentioned the integration with the image server. "Image server? We don’t have an image server. We have a server with a bunch of MrSid images on it." Indeed, the "tragedy of the commons" plays itself out on a daily basis on the shared drive that devolves into a dumping ground of data and folder names with nary a hint of metadata. WeoGeo, the "veteran" of cloud-based geospatial companies, has built a spatial data content management system on top of Amazon’s cloud. Offering more than simply a "not in-house" shared drive, content is cataloged so as to be both spatially searchable and available in multiple formats and projections. Deeper desktop integration via ArcMap tools is expected to be announced later this month.

New Business Models for Geospatial Functionality
Stepping back from specific features and functionality, it’s clear that a new model for delivering geospatial functionality is emerging. Vendors and users are no longer bound by one- or two-year release cycles, with disks arriving by mail plus periodic patches and bug fixes. Instead, the cloud enables vendors to roll out improvements on an ongoing basis without worrying about which users are on what version, since the software is controlled from a single location. Lower production costs combined with the already attractive infrastructure fees that Amazon, Google and Microsoft offer equal a potential total cost of ownership which would be an order of magnitude cheaper than the IT configurations found at many medium-sized GIS shops. Moving forward, it will be fascinating to see what tack entrenched vendors such as ESRI and Autodesk will take in offering users the significant benefits of the cloud while not unduly cannibalizing their existing revenue streams.

Long Live the GIS Analyst
Infrastructure-on-demand and pay-as-you go software that are tightly integrated with the desktop will positively reconfigure the default career paths in the geospatial industry. For many, higher salaries can only be found in the realms of project management, pure programmer/developers or systems administration - positions that take them far from the geographic interests that originally attracted them to the field. With the vast resources of the cloud readily integrated into everyday workflows, the mid-career GIS analyst can multiply her productivity (and, presumably, get a nice bump in salary) and deepen expertise in a world where models run in minutes instead of overnight, multi-scale cartographic representations are rendered as Web-ready tiles at the push of a button, and the huge volumes of data generated by LIDAR and the sensor web are stored and managed elegantly. Heady stuff to be sure, but the paradox of the cloud is about technology advancing so as not to be an end in itself, but rather taking its rightful place being simply in the service of creative spatial problem solving.


http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=3413

Interview: Carl Steinitz on GIS and Design

Interview: Carl Steinitz on GIS and Design

September 16, 2009 in Design, GIS, Interviews

cslargeESRI writer Jim Baumann recently interviewed Carl Steinitz on the integration of GIS and design, and we share a portion of that interview here. Steinitz, Alexander and Victoria Wiley Research Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, has been teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design since 1966. His interests are reflected in his teaching and research on landscape change, methods of landscape analysis, visual quality, and landscape planning and design. In 1984, he received the Outstanding Educator Award of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture; he also received the 1996 Distinguished Practitioner Award from the International Association for Landscape Ecology (U.S.A.). In 1997, he was chosen by the student body to receive the annual Graduate School of Design Teaching Award.

Baumann: You have stated, “At large scale, you are dealing with strategy, at middle scale you are dealing with tactics and as small scale, you are dealing with details.” Can you elaborate?

Steinitz: It is a generalization. When planning at regional scale, with changes such as new infrastructure, urbanization and conservation, or when looking at a regional scale plan, nobody cares if a village has two or three story buildings. When planning a village or looking at a village plan, nobody cares if the garden of a home has an apple tree or a pear tree. But when we were designing our garden, we preferred a cherry tree to an apple tree. Focus is typically a function of the lens of scale.

Baumann: How can GIS best be used in relationship to design when considering these telescoping scales?

Steinitz: We need to be able to work at several scales of resolution in space and classification.

Baumann: At what point should GIS be introduced into the design process?

Steinitz: GIS does not have an automatic role. If it is to play a role, it must be considered as part of the process of ‘designing’ the methodology of any study.

Baumann: How can GIS be used more effectively as a tool in architectural and landscape design?

Steinitz: This depends on many things: e.g. computer technologies, intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces, relevant software, appropriate data scale(s), needs for analysis, available or adapted models, trained people, and even fear and mistrust. The larger and riskier the design project, the more GIS is likely to be used.

Baumann: How would GIS tools that simulate dynamic processes be best used in the design process?

Steinitz: They can be useful in impact assessment when comparing alternatives, but would “best” be used in making designs—change models—iteratively, in immediate feedback interaction with impact evaluations.

Baumann: Would the development of a GIS data model for GeoDesign be feasible? If so, what would be included in it?

Steinitz: Not “a” data model, but rather capabilities for very flexible data models to meet particular data needs in time, space, and classification to be adapted to meet the needs of any particular design project. This will only be useful if the methodological framework for design can USE the data flexibilities in its several stages.

Baumann: Does a digital environment/alternative reality like Second Life play a role in landscape architecture?

Steinitz: I am not a fan of Second Life and consider it a sad retreat from real life. However, it has a potentially useful software base and is of interest to researchers at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London where I am Visiting Professor, and at other research groups. I expect it to be used more frequently to simulate projected designed environments. It can be adapted to be the medium of design.

Baumann: Michael Goodchild recently posed the question, “If spatial dependence in the form of Tobler’s First Law—nearby things are more related than distant things—is a general and fundamental principle of geography, what is its meaning in design?”

Steinitz: I have no idea what it means in design. But I do know that more and more designers are NOT following this law, and that technologies are increasingly enabling real time multi-user collaborations in Web-space. I have done this in teaching and research for years, and not with “local” collaborators.

Baumann: What does the future hold for the use of technology in design?

Steinitz: We will increasingly see experimentation in participatory design methods that are technology-driven, and that directly link to data acquisition at the beginning and to constructing changes at the end. Will the results be more “successful”? Who knows…but one can try.

Top Five Benefits of GIS

Top Five Benefits of GIS

September 14, 2009 in GIS

GIS benefits organizations of all sizes and in almost every industry. There is a growing interest in and awareness of the economic and strategic value of GIS, in part because of more standards-based technology and greater awareness of the benefits demonstrated by GIS users. The number of GIS enterprise solutions and IT strategies that include GIS are growing rapidly. The benefits of GIS generally fall into five basic categories:

1. Cost savings resulting from greater efficiency. These are associated either with carrying out the mission (i.e., labor savings from automating or improving a workflow) or improvements in the mission itself. A good case for both of these is Sears, which implemented GIS in its logistics operations and has seen dramatic improvements. Sears considerably reduced the time it takes for dispatchers to create routes for their home delivery trucks (by about 75%). It also benefited enormously in reducing the costs of carrying out the mission (i.e., 12%-15% less drive time by optimizing routes). Sears also improved customer service, reduced the number of return visits to the same site, and scheduled appointments more efficiently.

2. Better decision making. This typically has to do with making better decisions about location. Common examples include real estate site selection, route/corridor selection, zoning, planning, conservation, natural resource extraction, etc. People are beginning to realize that making the correct decision about a location is strategic to the success of an organization.

3. Improved communication. GIS-based maps and visualizations greatly assist in understanding situations and story telling. They are a new language that improves communication between different teams, departments, disciplines, professional fields, organizations, and the public.

4. Better geographic information recordkeeping. Many organizations have a primary responsibility of maintaining authoritative records about the status and change of geography (geographic accounting). Cultural geography examples are zoning, population census, land ownership, and administrative boundaries. Physical geography examples include forest inventories, biological inventories, environmental measurements, water flows, and a whole host of geographic accountings. GIS provides a strong framework for managing these types of systems with full transaction support and reporting tools. These systems are conceptually similar to other information systems in that they deal with data management and transactions, as well as standardized reporting (e.g., maps) of changing information. However, they are fundamentally different because of the unique data models and hundreds of specialized tools used in supporting GIS applications and workflows.

5. Managing geographically. In government and many large corporations, GIS is becoming essential to understand what is going on. Senior administrators and executives at the highest levels of government use GIS information products to communicate. These products provide a visual framework for conceptualizing, understanding, and prescribing action. Examples include briefings about various geographic patterns and relationships including land use, crime, the environment, and defense/security situations. GIS is increasingly being implemented as enterprise information systems. This goes far beyond simply spatially enabling business tables in a DBMS. Geography is emerging as a new way to organize and manage organizations. Just like enterprise-wide financial systems transformed the way organizations were managed in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, GIS is transforming the way that organizations manage their assets, serve their customers/citizens, make decisions, and communicate. Examples in the private sector include most utilities, forestry and oil companies, and most commercial/retail businesses. Their assets and resources are now being maintained as an enterprise information system to support day-to-day work management tasks and provide a broader context for assets and resource management.

http://gisandscience.com/2009/09/14/top-five-benefits-of-gis/

The Rise of Geoconsumerism

The Rise of Geoconsumerism

September 2, 2009 in GIS, Visualization

New Tools, the GeoWeb, Ubiquitous Data Bring “GIS for Everyone” Vision to Life

The vision of “GIS for everyone” has been around for a long time. GIS is a transformational technology, with the ability to empower the masses to make better decisions. But from an implementation standpoint, for many years the “GIS for everyone” vision was not very practical. For the most part, GIS use remained fairly exclusive; the tools, data, and decision making were relegated to a fairly small number of “GIS professionals.”

Happily, this landscape has changed over the course of the last few years. Development of a new generation of geospatial tools, proliferation of the Internet as a backbone for sharing and collaborating, and widespread availability of geospatial data have laid the foundation. The infrastructure is now in place to deliver powerful geospatial information and applications to almost every inhabitant of our planet. We’re seeing the dawn of a new age; an age of “geoconsumerism,” where geospatial information developed by GIS professionals is packaged in a way that it is quickly and easily available for use by everyone. “GIS for everyone” is here.

To illustrate this point, let’s look at an analogy: electricity. Electricity has been around for a long time. Scientists and researchers lead the “discovery” of many of the details of electricity. Once many of the details were discovered, engineers set out designing and building the infrastructure to electrify the world. Once the infrastructure was in place, inventors and industrial designers set about building products that leveraged the hard work of the engineers and delivered products to the masses—easy-to-use appliances for people who could benefit from this technology, but who didn’t need to know the details of amps and ohms, or how the electricity they were using was generated and where it actually came from. Throughout this evolution, electricity became available to exponentially more people and the knowledge and skills needed to work with electricity became heavily stratified.



Evolution of the Electrical Consumption System.

We don’t often think of it in this way, because most of the world has reliable electricity infrastructure, but every time we do something as simple as flip a light switch or turn on a TV, we are touching one small end of a huge, complex, sophisticated system designed to generate and transmit electrical current across many miles and deliver it where, when, and how we need it, in the most transparent fashion possible. The initial foundational work by the engineers to build the infrastructure, as well as ongoing work to maintain it and advance it, coupled with the brilliance of the inventors and industrial designers who give us products that leverage the electric infrastructure and make our lives easier and better, is often not fully appreciated by the consumer. And in a mature system, that’s the way it should be: the consumer should flip the switch, and it should “just work” in the most transparent way possible.

Looking at geospatial information, GIS professionals have been working hard over the last couple of decades to build the infrastructure. While not “complete,” this infrastructure is to the point where it is comprehensive enough that it can be of great value to many people beyond the traditional GIS audience. Making the infrastructure accessible to “everyone” is now in the hands of developers.



Evolution of the Geospatial Information Consumption System.

Some developers are taking a more traditional approach, often developing sophisticated applications for very specific uses, while others are looking at ways to bring more simple applications to a much larger audience. Both approaches are valuable and needed, and the line between them is beginning to blur as developers focus on using the most appropriate techniques, tools, and methods for the intended audience.

The next generation of geospatial applications will have broad relevance across society, will leverage the infrastructure built and maintained by GIS professionals, will make people’s lives easier and better, and will be transparent and “just work.” Developers, this is your time. “Everyone” is waiting.


http://gisandscience.com/2009/09/02/the-rise-of-geoconsumerism/

How to map out a new role for yourself as a cartographer

How to map out a new role for yourself as a cartographer

If you like geography, are good on detail and have ace computer skills, you should consider a career as a cartographer.

By Caroline Roberts
Thursday, 30 July 2009

You might be forgiven for thinking that most of the world has been mapped by now. But, because of the constantly changing landscape and the growing amount of information about the earth available through technological advances, there's still a need for skilled cartographers to sift the data and turn it into something meaningful for the rest of us.

"Cartography involves assessing and amalgamating bits of geographic information and presenting them in a map form that's relevant for a particular user," says Mick Ashworth, a former editor of The Times Atlas Of The World who now runs his own company, Ashworth Maps and Interpretation. This can mean producing anything from maps to keep ramblers on track to surveys for oil and gas exploration.

It's a diverse field. There are opportunities in mapping agencies such as the Ordnance Survey, national and local government departments, and in industries such as utilities, and commercial map publishers. Britain also has some important map collections, and cartographers can choose to specialise in historical maps.

Map production involves a mixture of art, science and technology, with the latter becoming more important in recent years. The job now often involves the use of geographic information systems (GIS), which store data digitally and, as well as outputting maps, allow it to be analysed in different ways. The varied nature of the industry means cartographers come from a range of backgrounds including IT and graphic design. But Ashworth says it's important to have an interest in geography and some background in the subject. Attention to detail and good research skills are essential.

Most people's image of the Ordnance Survey stems from school geography lessons spent poring over trig points and gradients, but Ed Mainwaring's job in a cartographic design team involves creating maps in varied styles. He'll be designing spectator maps for the London stage of the cycling Tour of Britain one day and charts showing land levels for newspaper articles on the risk of flooding the next.

"I source the data and do the design work in graphics packages, drawing freehand on a computer," he says. Mainwaring came to the job via a degree in robotics and intelligent machines, and his interest in mapping was sparked when he designed a robot that used a GPS receiver to navigate. He now uses his IT expertise to programme GIS systems to output data for other cartographers. Imagination is important, he says, as you need to be able to visualise how the data can be translated on to paper.

"You have to create symbols that work with each other. There's a hierarchy of information for each map and you have to make sure the important things stand out," he adds. This involves communicating well with clients.

Above all, he enjoys the job's technical and creative challenges. "The Tour of Britain wanted little graphics rather than just symbols to represent major sites," he says. "I had to work out how to draw St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey so they're recognisable at one inch across."

But will internet mapping sites such as Google Earth lessen the need for cartographers? No, says Ashworth, adding: "Those things have raised people's awareness of maps, and made them question what a good map is. There will always be a need for cartographers to show them."

Cartography facts

* A degree in geography is a good starting point but other relevant subjects include art and design, IT, sciences, surveying and GIS. There are also opportunities to work overseas, so knowledge of a foreign language can be useful.

* For more information, visit the British Cartographic Society at www.cartography.org.uk where you can find a list of undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

* See the Association for Geographic Information, www.agi.org.uk, for a list of GIS degrees.

* Starting salaries for graduates are in the region of £20,000. A senior cartographer can earn £35,000 to £40,000.

App Programming for GIS

รายวิชา 104411 การเขียนโปรแกรมประยุกต์ระบบสารสนเทศภูมิศาสตร์ 3(2-2-5)
(Application Programming for Geographic Information System)

จำนวนหน่วยกิต 3(2-2-5)

คำอธิบายรายวิชา
พื้นฐานที่สำคัญอีกอย่างหนึ่งของการสั่งงานอัตโนมัติเพื่อเพิ่มความสะดวกในการจัดการกับข้อมูล การจัดการและการค้นคืนฐานข้อมูล กระบวนการข้อมูลเชิงตัวเลข การวิเคราะห์ข้อมูลพื้นที่ขั้นสูง การจำลองแบบ และการสร้างโมเดลการวิเคราะห์ทางด้านภูมิสารสนเทศ คือการเขียนโปรแกรมประยุกต์ โดยการเขียนโปรแกรมดังกล่าวมีหลายระดับตั้งแต่การเขียนโปรแกรมสั่งงานด้วยภาษาขั้นสูงที่มากับซอฟท์แวร์แต่ละซอฟท์แวร์ จนถึงการเขียนโปรแกรมเชิงวัตถุโดยใช้องค์ประกอบวัตถุ (component) ที่มีการพัฒนามาแล้ว และการพัฒนาโปรแกรมขึ้นใหม่โดยใช้ภาษาระดับกลาง เช่น Visual Basic, JAVA และ C++ ในรายวิชานี้นิสิตจะได้เรียนรู้ถึงการโปรแกรมที่สำคัญอีกอย่างหนึ่งในปัจจุบันก็คือ การโปรแกรมและการแสดงแผนที่บนอินเตอร์เนต

วัตถุประสงค์
1. เพื่อให้นิสิตได้เรียนรู้พื้นฐานการโปรแกรมเชิงวัตถุสำหรับระบบสารสนเทศภูมิศาสตร์
2. เพื่อให้นิสิตได้ฝึกทักษะการเขียนโปรแกรมเชิงวัตถุระดับต่าง ๆ ตั้งแต่การโปรแกรมสั่งงานอัตโนมัติในซอฟท์แวร์ระบบสารสนเทศภูมิศาสตร์ และการโปรแกรมด้วยภาษาระดับกลางอย่าง JAVA
เพื่อให้สามารถนำความรู้ไปประยุกต์ใช้ในการออกแบบการวิเคราะห์ข้อมูลพื้นที่ และสร้างระบบประยุกต์ขั้นสูงได้
3. เพื่อให้มีความรู้ความเข้าใจเกี่ยวกับ การโปรแกรมและสร้างแผนที่บนอินเตอร์เนต