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What is GIS?
The 21st Century
offers technology, which brings unparalleled opportunity to turn a flood of
raw data into comprehensible information about our society and our planet.
Put to good use, it holds promise of broad societal and commercial benefits
in areas such as resource assessment, environmental monitoring, agriculture,
land-use planning, education, decision-making and crisis management…in other
words - a sustainable future.
Geographic Information Systems
are computer system for capturing, managing, integrating, manipulating,
analyzing and displaying data which is spatially referenced to the Earth.
GIS draws on several related disciplines.
GIS deals with
spatial information. It has the capability to relate layers of data for the
same geographic location and mapping out the results. In broad terms, a Geographic
Information System could be defined as a set of principles and techniques
employed to achieve one (or both) of the following objectives:
·
Finding suitable locations that have the
relevant attributes. For example, finding a suitable location where an
airport, a commercial forest or a retail outlet can be established. This is
usually achieved through the use of Boolean (logical) operations.
·
Querying the geographical attributes of a specified location.
For example, examining the roads in a particular locality, to check road
density or find the shortest path, and so on. This is often achieved by
‘clicking’ onto the location or object of interest, and examining the
contents of the database for that location or object.
GIS data
are usually stored in more than one layer in order to overcome the technical
problems caused by handling very large amounts of information at once. It is
easier to work with complex spatial problems one layer at a time, to enable
the revision of the data without having to overhaul the entire information
system. This is a fundamental aspect of GIS, and working with layers of
geographical information is known as data integration.
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