About

Faculty from Purdue University Libraries are offering a geoinformatics course in Spring 2010.

Geoinformatics is a rapidly-growing and increasingly important field in which geoscientific technologies, data, and workflows are examined together as irrevocably interrelated pieces of a growing cyberinfrastructure. It is important for current and future geoscientists to be aware of the arc of geoscience — not just modeling and analysis, say, but the fuller picture of data acquisition, manipulation, documentation, visualization, and sharing.

This course provides a fuller picture of how one finds and evaluates information, prepares and manipulates data, uses the tools of analysis and visualization (including GIS), and conducts their work so that data and information can be made reusable by the next scientist down the line. It is an holistic approach presented in a hands-on, project-driven course with opportunities to develop skills in visualization and analysis, using workflow management software to automate tasks, connecting technologies and data, and curating geospatial data so it is reusable by the scientific community.

The grading for the course will consist of laboratory work and a final project that ties together the concepts of the course. The focus of this class is on earth and atmospheric sciences, but it should also be of interest to any discipline using geospatial information for scientific analysis.