If you have address-based data that you wish to map in GIS, you'll need to assign latitude and longitude coordinates to your data so you can plot them as points. Baruch affiliates can contact the geospatial librarian for assistance.

Vector: discrete coordinates and surfaces represented as points, lines, or polygons (areas). Shapefiles, geopacakges, geoJSON

Raster: continuous surface divided into grid cells of equal size. Geotiff, tif, JPG

Tables: data tables that contain records for places that can be converted by plotting coordinates or joining identifiers to a vector file. Delimited text files, spreadsheets, database tables

Geodatabase: collection of vectors, rasters, and tables in a database file. ArcGIS gdb / mdb, SQLite, PostGIS

Compressed files: containers that hold several data files. ZIP files

In order to use GIS software, you'll have to download and add some GIS data. This page shows you the different GIS file formats and types and provides you with a number of online sources for accessing data. Some general places to start:

This is Baruch's GIS data repository. Includes a mix of public and Baruch-only datasets:

• China Data Center - features, boundaries, and census data for China (Baruch only)
• ESRI data - features for the world, US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe (some public)
• IRS Migration Databases - annual county to county and state to state migration flows (public)
• NYC Geodatabase - geodatabase of NYC features and neighborhood-level census data (public)
• NYC Transit Spatial Layers - city and metro area transportation features including: buses, subways, and trains (public)
• NYC Geocoded Real Estate Sales - location of every property sold in NYC for over a dozen years (public)
• US Census Population Centroids - point features representing the center of a population's distribution (public)