What is Geographic Information System?
| A GIS (Geographic Information System) enables you to envision the geographic aspects of a body of data. Basically, it lets you query or analyze a database and receive the results in the form of some kind of map. Since many kinds of data have important geographic aspects, a GIS can have many uses: weather forecasting, sales analysis, population forecasting, and land use planning, to name a few. Geogaphic Information Systems perform the following functions: |
- They accept geographic input in the form of scanned-in and digitized map images. Often this data is supplied by a source that may own maps and has already digitized them.
- They rescale or otherwise manipulate geographic data for different purposes.
- They include a database manager, usually a relational database management system (RDBMS).
- They include query and analysis programs so that you can retrieve answers to simple questions such as the distance between two points on a map or more complicated questions that require analysis, such as determining the traffic pattern at a given intersection
- They provide answers visually, usually as maps or graphs.
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