[MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to the second course in the GIS Specialization on Coursera. For those of you just joining this specialization, I'm Nick Santos. I'm the primary instructor in this course and a GIS Analyst and software developer for the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California Davis, where we identify and solve California water issues. In this course, we're going to build on the knowledge you gained in the first course, fundamentals of GIS, and explore how to create your own data, different storage formats, data validity, and presenting this information on web maps. If you're brand new to GIS, I would recommend going back and taking the first course in the specialization book before beginning this one. Even if you already have some experience, it's still a good idea to take a look at that first course to make sure you have an understanding of each of the topics before continuing on with this one. This course should significantly increase your knowledge and ability in using GIS. We'll start with some practical theory, by diving deeper into the vector and raster data models. Understanding these two types of data is critical to success as a GIS Analyst. It takes time to understand these data types, so we want to make sure you're introduced to them early, so that you can get plenty of practice. From there, we'll cover data design and table joins, specifically related to types of data in attribute tables, and how we can separate out complex data into multiple datasets, to make it easier to use and more reusable. We'll work with vector data in depth, starting with a refresher on geoprocessing, and an introduction to the intersect tool. You'll then learn a bit about how to talk to databases, as we cover writing query strings to subset our data. Then, you'll learn how to build on your datasets by adding and calculating fields, and then subset data further with interactive selection. We'll also talk about how to edit existing features and create whole new feature classes. I suspect many of you have been waiting for this. We'll cover everything you need to know to get started digitizing data. In the second half of this course, we'll go over practical considerations in choosing a storage format, including file and personal geodatabases, shape files, and SQL-like databases, and then we'll start working with raster data. We'll discuss the use of spatial analyst tools, and then we'll go into georeferencing rasters. We'll also go in depth into data quality. I'll tell you about some major considerations when designing your data, and, when going through analysis, and some things to be aware of, that might limit the legitimacy and applicability of your results. We'll wrap up the class with an introduction to a very practical skill, how to turn all this data you're working with into web maps. We'll cover loading data into ArcGIS online, some basic analysis work using ArcGIS online, and then how to share the maps you've created. Finally, for those of you taking the whole specialization, the course will wrap with a final assignment that will let you put all of these skills to the test. You'll have practice assignments throughout the course, but the final assignment will bring them all together into one project. I think this class is packed with knowledge and new skills to learn. I'm so glad you're here to take it. We have a lot to cover, so let's get started. [MUSIC]