Hi there! I’m Esbern Holmes, a teacher and GIS consultant at Roskilde University in Denmark. Welcome to my digital garden of GIS and Geoinformatics. This is a place where I share my personal notes and musings on these technologies. Some notes are crafted as learning resources to share knowledge, while others are part of my own journey in personal knowledge management.
You might stumble upon some dead links—that’s intentional! Just like seeds in a real garden, I’ve planted ideas that haven’t sprouted into full notes yet. These placeholders are signs of growth in progress.
Feel free to explore, and if you have any comments or requests, please drop me a line at info@gis-garden.org.
Organising the GIS Digital Garden
This garden reflects the evolving nature of GIS and the diverse ways GIS projects can be implemented. Here’s a brief overview of how the garden is structured:
Processing Environments
The processing environment is the face of the GIS, defining how you interact with it and probably what most people associate with a GIS, such as ArcGIS Pro or QGIS. However, the processing environment is only the tip of the iceberg. The “real power” of a GIS lies in the geospatial tool collection it sits atop. These geospatial tool collections can often be accessed through multiple different processing environments, not only Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) as we know it from QGIS or ArcGIS Pro but also “programming first” environments such as JupyterLab or “Graphical Workflow Builder.” such as “Model builder”. Explore more about Choosing the right processing environment.
Tool collection
The backbone of any GIS lies in the Geospatial tool collection it utilises to do the heavy lifting of geospatial data analysis. This garden explores various Geospatial tool collections, from specialised tool collections like GDAL to general geospatial analytical tools such as “Whitebox geospatial”. We will also cover some tool collections from “adjacent” topics, such as Plotly and Matplotlib for general data visualisation and Unreal Engine for real-time 3D rendering.
Geospatial data
While it is outside the scope of this garden to provide access to data sources, we will discuss how to design data structures, different Data Formats and Standards and some main access routes, especially, Danish data such as Dataforsyningen, geo-data.info.
GIS projects
A GIS project is more than just the the processing enviorment and the underlying tool collections and geospatial data. It’s a structured endeavor that encompasses goals, methods, data, and tools, operating within an organizational framework to achieve specific objectives. This garden contains noten on subjects relating to how to design and implement your GIS projects such as covering the process From Reality to Geospatial Data and how to write a Design Rationale
Getting Started
If this is your first time visiting the garden, I recommend checking out these foundational notes:
- My thoughts on learning GIS.
- Integrating Generative AI with your learning process.
- This site is a Digital Garden.
- Navigating the site.
Ready to explore? You can jump to one of the Maps of Content (MOCs) in the collection or directly to one of the base MOCs: