GIS Education at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

GIS education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) is focused on the preparation of graduate students for a professional career in geographic information systems. The program recognizes that students have two quite different needs concerning GIS education when it comes to preparing for a profession.

These two needs are:

An exposure to GIS concepts for use within a particular discipline (becoming GIS literate); and

A concentration in GIS concepts as a discipline itself (becoming a GIS professional).

The first course, Introduction to Urban Geographic Information Systems (URB PLAN 791), consists of lectures, readings, case studies, videos, guest lecturers, and site visits to local GIS installation sites. The purpose of this course is to provide students from various disciplines with the basic concepts and range of applications of geographic information systems in local government . It emphasizes the use of information in public agencies for service delivery, management, and policy-planning activities and how the geographic nature of that information can improve the productivity and decisions of engineers, planners, tax assessors, administrators, managers, and elected officials at all levels of the organization. Technical topics provide future users of this technology with an appreciation of its power and complexity and also provide future GIS professionals with a sound basis for implementing and using geographic information systems in an organization. Major topics covered include GIS applications, topology, data base management, land records, geographic base files, hardware and software, and project management issues. The text used is Huxhold's, An Introduction to Urban Geographic Information Systems, published by Oxford University Press in 1991.

The laboratory component of the course provides a “hands on” environment for exploring GIS software capabilities beginning with a brief exposure to ArcView Desktop GIS software and then moving to an in-depth series of exercises using ARC/INFO software. These “GIS County” exercises include digitizing maps, creating topology, building attribute databases, searching databases and generating reports, and performing map overlay, buffering, and other spatial analysis functions using ARC/INFO. GIS County is a fictitious county that contains maps of local land records (88 parcels, 16 blocks, 5 districts and one subdivision plan) and databases of tax assessment records, building permits, and population data. Before using the GIS software, however, the students are required to perform some of the tasks manually such as creating topology, building the geographic base file, answering geographic questions, and preparing a summary data report on land use. This early "hands on" approach to geographic data is intended to give the student a basic understanding of what the GIS software does with the data later when the computer is used to do the same tasks. The course uses the lab manual, GIS County Users Guide: Laboratory Exercises in Geographic Information Systems, which was written by Huxhold and four former students and published in 1997 by Oxford University Press.

The second course, Using Urban Geographic Information Systems (URB PLAN 792), consists of intensive, semester-long exercises in building geographic databases and using GIS software. It emphasizes advanced GIS skills in a Windows NT platform, including ARC/INFO and ArcView, using authentic data from the City of Milwaukee.

The course begins with an exploration of local government data typically experienced in a local government GIS: digital parcel maps and parcel-level attribute data. Students work with the Milwaukee Property File (MPROP), containing attributes of all parcels in the city, and then work with the Milwaukee Quarter-Section Land Use digital maps to gain exposure to authentic data in a GIS.

This is followed by an introduction to Windows NT when a more detailed discussion is given to the workstation version of ARC/INFO and ArcView. Fundamental algorithms for a variety of spatial analyses are introduced such as buffer, line intersection, point-in-polygon, and polygon overlay operations. More advanced concepts and skills in ArcEdit, and ArcPlot are included.

The ArcView portion gives the hands-on experience and conceptual overview needed to take full advantage of ArcView GIS software's display, editing, analysis, and presentation mapping functions. Students become familiar with the components of the ArcView interface and learn how views, tables, charts, and layouts are used to display and work with different kinds of information. Students use ArcView GIS to display, edit, query, and analyze geographic and tabular data and create presentation charts and maps using data from the City of Milwaukee.

The third course, Applied Projects in Urban Geographic Information Systems (URB PLAN 793), is the capstone course in the series because it offers students the opportunity to use the skills they have gained in the earlier courses together with authentic local government data to solve a problem or study an issue for a real client. By using data that has been transferred from the City of Milwaukee to the University, the mundane tasks of digitizing and data entry are avoided (GIS County already gave them a flavor for that!) so that the students can concentrate on the capabilities of GIS software to solve real world problems. Previously completed GIS Student Projects include:

a homelessness prevention project for an area in Milwaukee about to experience gentrification;

a housing survey and analysis project for a neighborhood organization;

a breast cancer awareness project for the City of Milwaukee Health Department;

an evaluation of the African-American Immersion Program for two central city elementary schools;

a GIS database development and mapping project for a neighborhood community development corporation strategic planning effort;

an analysis of the impact on property values surrounding proposed light rail system stops;

a commuter information system that identifies the nearest bus to an address that travels to City Hall with one or no transfers;

an economic development plan for a community organization that experienced the loss of a major industrial employer in the central city (a project that recently was awarded second place in the ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) User's Group contest on ArcView applications). an evaluation of neighborhood quality indicators and their relationship to public investment in housing for the Community Block Grant Administration of the City of Milwaukee.

This course benefits from a unique relationship between the University and the City of Milwaukee because all of the Milwaukee digital parcel maps and parcel attribute data (Milwaukee Property File MPROP) are transferred to the University on a regular basis.

GIS Course Enrollments

Since the GIS courses were first offered by the Department of Urban Planning in the fall of 1988, a total of 639 students have completed at least one of the three courses. During that ten-year period (1988-1998), the courses were offered 31 times, resulting in an average class size of 20.6 students. As is typical of the multidisciplinary use of GIS, only 37% of those students have been Urban Planning students. Other majors include: geography, architecture, urban studies, engineering, and others. About 65% of all the students have been graduate students.

GIS Laboratory Facilities ( see school recourses )

GIS Certificate Program

For those students who desire a deeper concentration in order to prepare for a career in GIS, the University also offers a formal course of study in GIS technology leading to a certificate. Approved by the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents in 1993, the "Certificate Program in Urban Geographic Information Systems" recognizes the multidisciplinary nature of GIS technology and application by identifying a prescribed set of courses from ten different departments on campus. The program directs students to these courses so that they can obtain critical background and skills that relate to GIS technology: database management, cartography, remote sensing, surveying, etc. A total of 21 credits are required to obtain the Certificate. Although it is administered by the Department of Urban Planning in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the certificate is available to any Master's student on campus. It is awarded simultaneously with the student's Master's degree.

In the process of developing the set of prescribed courses for the program, extensive research was done to identify the critical skills needed for a comprehensive understanding of GIS technology from published research and interviews with professional GIS managers. This information was then correlated with existing courses on campus that addressed those skills, resulting in the following grouping of prescribed courses: (see uwm web site)

In the first six years of the program, 28 graduates have been awarded the Certificate in Urban Geographic Information Systems. Most are currently employed in the GIS profession:

• City of Milwaukee; 
• Milwaukee suburbs of New Berlin, Glendale, Brookfield and Waukesha;
• Wisconsin Electric Power Company;
• Lake County (IL), Bay Lakes Regional Planning Commission WI), and Winnebago County 1(WI); City of Chicago, Village of Barrington (IL), 
• A Fortune 200 company (Johnson Controls, Inc.); Walgreens, MLG Developers
• Environmental Systems Research Institute; Cham Hill, Fotn & Van Dyke, US Bank
• Four GIS consulting agencies.

GIS across the Campus at UWM

Interest in GIS at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is strong, not only on the part of the students, but also on the part of faculty from a variety of disciplines across campus. In 1990, an ad hoc committee was formed that has now become the UWM GIS Council consisting of 50 faculty and staff from 10 departments and 6 research and service institutions on campus. The UWM GIS Council was formed to coordinate GIS activities, share experiences, educate each other, and improve communications on GIS-related education, research, and community service topics.

Some of the most active research and service activities of Council members include:

• Neighborhood redevelopment in Milwaukee
• Lake Michigan, harbor, and Milwaukee River Watershed environmental studies
• Digital Spatial Data Clearinghouse for disseminating geographic data across campus

Additional information about the UWM GIS can be found at the World Wide Web site:

In addition, the UWM GIS Council, chaired by Professor Huxhold, has created two listservs on the University’s network for increasing networking opportunities:

“GIS”   (for disseminating information about GIS across campus)

"GIS-JOBS”  (for distributing GIS job information to students across campus)

In 1997, the University was accepted for membership in the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science , an organization of over 40 educational institutions that was established to further GIS education and research in the United States.

Other Campus Resources for GIS

Data, the mainstay of successful GIS utilization, has been enhanced this year by the addition of historical property records from the City of Milwaukee. Funded by a grant from the UWM Urban Research Center, the University has obtained the annual Milwaukee Property (MPROP) files which contain over 80 characteristics of each of the almost 160,000 properties in Milwaukee for each year since 1975 along with the digital property maps of the City. The MPROP files and the digital parcel maps are disseminated throughout campus on the University's DEC Alpha (UNIX-based) network.

Also available are digital ortho photographs of Milwaukee and Waukesha counties at the Library's Spatial Data Clearinghouse. Additional South Eastern Wisconsin counties are scheduled to be available in the future.

Additional information on campus-wide GIS resources can be seen at the UWM GIS.