Collecting some data

Now that we have our software installed and configured, we can focus on collecting some open source data. Data collecting (or data capture) is one of the key expertise of a GIS professional and it often covers a major part of a project budget. Surveying is expensive (for example, equipment, amortization, staff, and so on); however, buying data can also be quite costly. On the other hand, there is open and free data out there, which can drastically reduce the cost of basic analysis. It has some drawbacks, though. For example, the licenses are much harder to attune with commercial activity, because some of them are more restrictive.

There are two types of data collection. The first one is primary data collection, where we measure spatial phenomena directly. We can measure the locations of different objects with GPS, the elevation with radar or lidar, the land cover with remote sensing. There are truly a lot of ways of data acquisition with different equipment. The second type is secondary data collection, where we convert already existing data for our use case. A typical secondary data collection method is digitizing objects from paper maps. In this section, we will acquire some open source primary data.

The only thing to consider is our study area. We should choose a relatively small administrative division, like a single county. For example, I'm choosing the county I live in as I'm quite familiar with it and it's small enough to make further analysis and visualization tasks fast and simple: