From the course: Real-World GIS

Understanding GIS data types - ArcGIS Pro Tutorial

From the course: Real-World GIS

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Understanding GIS data types

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- [Instructor] GIS data typically tries to represent reality. The re-presentation or representation of places as points or polygons or images acts as a metaphor for reality, and as the mapmaker or cartographer, you have the variety of symbology available to you in ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro to visualize and enable design options for your data. There are two main GIS data types. Vector data refers mostly to data represented as points or lines or polygons, while raster data is made up of rows and columns or grids and pixels and is most commonly thought of as imagery. I'll discuss both later in this course. The data types have developed since the advent of the 1960s emergence of GIS in Canada, in England, and the United States, and through the work of several people in analytical cartography, vector data and raster data types became the dominant vocabulary. With the advent of the personal computer in the 1980s, ESRI focus was on software application development of ArcInfo. According to the ESRI website, they first developed ArcInfo in 1982 for microcomputers, and by 1986, a PC version was available and distributed. ArcInfo is a command-line based software package that handles both vector and raster geographic data, and it's been the industry standard tool since its implementation, even though other competitors do exist. In contrast to ArcInfo, a much less exhaustive ESRI software package called ArcView was released in the early 1990s. Although not as comprehensive as ArcInfo, ArcView has a major advantage over its big brother, a graphical user interface. It's with this graphical user interface that ArcView has become one of the most popular GIS packages worldwide. In late 1999, ArcView 8 was released, which is better known under its new name, ArcGIS, which is an umbrella term for all the components of ArcGIS. ESRI combined many of the features of ArcInfo into a redesigned graphical user interface to produce an all-in-one GIS system. We call our current software ArcView 10.8 or ArcGIS 10.8, and some just call it ArcMap 10.8. ArcGIS Pro was released in 2015. It is a powerful and complex GIS software. Built on the concepts and experience of ArcView, ArcGIS Pro takes advantage of current computing technology. It is 64-bit enabled and has 2D and 3D mapping capabilities, and is tightly coupled to the the arcgis.com online environment, tapping into the wider ESRI software ecosystem. ESRI has introduced different vector data models with ArcInfo, ArcView, and ArcGIS while expanding data options for raster data, so let's dive into those now.

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