Few Applications of GIS

Geographic information system technology can be used for scientific investigations, resource management, asset management, Environmental Impact Assessment, Urban planning, cartography, and route planning. For example, a GIS might allow emergency planners to easily calculate emergency response times in the event of a natural disaster, or a GIS might be used to find wetlands that need protection from pollution.

Geographic information systems have emerged in the last decade as an essential tool for urban and resource planning and management. Their capacity to store, retrieve, analyse, model and map large areas with huge volumes of spatial data has led to an extraordinary proliferation of applications. Geographic information systems are now used for land use planning, utilities management, ecosystems modelling, landscape assessment and planning, transportation and infrastructure planning, market analysis, visual impact analysis, facilities management, tax assessment, real estate analysis and many other applications.

Functionalities of GIS

Functions of GIS include:

• Data entry or Data creation
• Data display
• Data management
• Information retrieval and analysis

A more comprehensive and easy way to define GIS is the one that looks at the disposition, in layers of its data sets. "Group of maps of the same portion of the territory, where a given location has the same coordinates in all the maps included in the system". This way, it is possible to analyse its thematic and spatial characteristics to obtain a better knowledge of this zone.

Data Creation

Geospatial data has both spatial and thematic components.
Conceptually, geographic data can be broken up in two elements: observation or entity and attribute or variable. GIS have to be able to manage both elements.
Spatial component: The observations have two aspects in its localisation: absolute localisation based in a coordinates system and topological relationship referred to other observations. Example: The ITC, Enschede is located at the particular coordinate X,Y, or, The ITC is located on Hengelosestraat Road, Near Enschede Railway station. A GIS is able to manage both while computer assisted cartography packages only manage the absolute one.
Thematic component: The variables or attributes can be studied considering the thematic aspect (statistics), the locational aspect (spatial analysis) or both (GIS).

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