Chapter 2. Using Geographic Principles

This chapter will provide you with an introduction of the geographic principles, such as coordinate system, spheroid, coordinate reference system, geodetic datum, geoid, and map projections. We will learn to distinguish between geographic and projected coordinate systems, and we will use the datum transformations to correctly convert and transform different coordinate reference systems (CRS). We will also apply different map projections to the same dataset to visually analysis the patters of distortion.

By the end of this chapter, you will learn the following topics:

• Using coordinate systems
• Geodetic datum and geoid
• Using coordinate reference systems
• Using map projections
• Transforming coordinate reference systems