Part of the GIS Day 2011 festivities at Texas A&M University included a student poster display in Evans Libary on the main campus. There were 29 posters covering a wide range of GIS topics from various classes and departments. All 29 posters contained a scalebar, a legend, and a North arrow. But only three contained any sort of projection information.
GIS analysis, by definition, requires 2 or more datasets – one dataset is just a map, right? For a spatial analysis to make any kind of sense, there has to be some level of confidence that the datasets are correctly aligned with one another. That confidence is easiest to achieve by providing projection information. Claiming that a map uses Wisconsin Central State Plane doesn’t prove that the data is properly aligned. But it does imply that the cartographer has taken every possible step to insure the correctness of the map. Knowing the projection is the first step toward correctly managing projections.
I wonder if providing projection information would be more common if desktop GIS layout programs used a simple function to insert it into the map? ArcGIS has made adding a North arrow to a project so easy that most users don’t bother to stop and consider whether it is functionally necessary. I’d like to see similar functionality with regard to projections.
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