Simply put, a GIS combines layers of information about a place to give you a better understanding of that place. What layers of information you combine depends on your purpose—finding the best location for a new store, analyzing environmental damage, viewing similar crimes in a city to detect a pattern, and so on.
What is GIS?, PDF slide show, (1.89 MB)
Geography Matters, PDF white paper from ESRI (319 KB)
What do you need to use GIS?
A full GIS, or geographic information system, requires:
• Hardware (computers and peripherals)
• Software
• Data
• People
• Training and sound analysis methods for interpreting the results generated by the GIS.
>> Read on for more detailed information.
How To Use GIS
Mapping Where Things Are
Mapping where things are lets you find places that have the features you are looking for and to see where to take action.
1. Find a feature—People use maps to see where or what an individual feature is.
2. Finding patterns—By looking at the distribution of features on the map instead of just an individual feature, you can see patterns emerge.
This map shows the location of man-made objects such as buildings, antennas, and towers, as well as landscape features that can pose dangers to aircraft leaving or approaching airfields.
Map courtesy of General Command of Mapping Cartography Department, Ankara, Turkey.
[1] Mapping Where Things Are
[2] Mapping Quantities
[3] Mapping Densities
[4] Finding What's Inside
[5] Finding What's Nearby
[6] Mapping Change
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How To Use GIS
Mapping Quantities
People map quantities, such as where the most and least are, to find places that meet their criteria and take action, or to see the relationships between places. This gives an additional level of information beyond simply mapping the locations of features.
For example, a catalog company selling children's clothes would want to find ZIP Codes not only around their store, but also those ZIP Codes with many young families with relatively high income. Or, public health officials might want not only to map physicians but also to map the numbers of physicians per...
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...the form of a map. The difference is not simply aesthetic, it is conceptual—it turns out that the way you see your data has a profound effect on the connections you make and the conclusions you draw from it. GIS gives you the layout and drawing tools that help present facts with clear, compelling documents. top GIS for Educators
Most problems facing the world today—environmental, economic, political, or social—exist in a geographic context. GIS provides the geographic research and analysis tools to bring this context to students.
This map shows the coal resources and availability for mining for the Villa Grove Quadrangle, Douglas County, Illinois. It is one of a set from an atlas of detailed geologic information and derivative maps.
Interpreted geologic maps and derivative maps such as this are important tools for implementing "smart growth." Community officials and urban planners can make better land use decisions regarding natural resources when they use these informative maps. Coal mining companies also use maps like this to guide their investment and mine planning decisions.
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Bibliography
www.gis.com
E. Bronston, "Geographic Information Systems at Peabody Western Coal Company's Black Mesa Complex," in Geospatial Conference, 2004.
This feature is basically like a mini tour guide, it leads you to the landmarks, then provides a brief historical information on them.
In the short story Incognita, Inc. by Harlan Ellison, we explore the idea of topography and how it serves as a map. The story mainly focuses a man named Charles Trimbach who works for a company known as Incognita Inc. which had been acquired by an enterprise called Worldspan. Charles Trimbach is sent to his hometown Chicago to close down a small map shop owned by his corporation. As Charles Trimbach, goes to talk to the owner about closing down his shop, he takes a trip down memory lane and remembers coming to this shop when he was younger looking for something he had lost, and the shop owner gave him a map that helped him find his lost item. Maps have been around for a long time. They have served as guidelines to the
Cognitive mapping are imaging of the attributes of our environment, according to Edward Tolman, (1948). Tolman, suggested that cognitive mapping are also a mental picture or image of a person’s physical environment. For example, my best friend moved away to Texas ten years ago. Nonetheless, we were college roommates back some twenty years ago. When, I decided to celebrate my 50th birthday five years ago, she decided to come back and celebrate my birthday with me. When, she got off the train, I gave her precise directions because of my cognitive mapping which were the images of the important streets that she should follow to be able to come directly to my house without getting lost. My cognitive mapping skills allowed me to create a mental
3. After the purchase of land (cookie) and equipment, the cookie was placed on the graph paper and its outline was traced. Then, the initial topography of the region was determined and recorded (Turn the cookie on its side and draw the side-view).
The Five Themes of Geography are: Location – Absolute points on a map or grid or Relative to where something may be; Place – The physical and/or human characteristics of a locations; Human/Environment Interactions – How humans have impacted the landscape or environment; Relationship between places Movement – How humans interact on the earth (i.e. how they communicate over distance (short or long)) and Regions – a unit of space that has commonalities defined by physical, human and environmental geography. The Explorers of the New World may have not known what the Five Themes of Geography were but they quickly learned. Of the five themes the ones that they all took advantage of was the physical Location and Place as they learned to navigate to and from as well as through their new environments. Over Time the explorers began to discover the relationships within their environments and original occupants of the lands as well as the regions in which they now occupied.
Geographers plan new communities, decide where new highways should be placed, and establish evacuation plans. Computerized mapping and data analysis is known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a new frontier in geography. Spatial data is gathered on a variety of subjects and input onto a computer. GIS users can create an infinite number of maps by requesting portions of the data to plot.
Historical geographer JB Harley wrote an essay on Map Deconstruction in 1989, in which Harley argues that a map is more than just a geographical representation of an area, his theory is that we need to look at a map not just as a geographical image but in its entire context. Harley points out that by an examination of the social structures that have influenced map making, that we may gain more knowledge about the world. The maps social construction is made from debate about what it should show. Harley broke away from the traditional argument about maps and examined the biases that govern the map and the map makers, by looking at what the maps included or excluded. Harley’s “basic argument within this essay is that we should encourage an epistemological shift in the way we interpret the nature of cartography.” Therefore Harley’s aim within his essay on ‘Deconstructing the Map’ was to break down the assumed ideas of a map being a purely scientific creation.
Hillier, A., & Culhane, D. (2013). GIS Applications and Administrative Data to Support Community Change. In M. Weil (Ed.), The Handbook of Community Practice (2nd ed., pp. 827-844). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Retrieved from
...rent to modern scientific maps; it drew on a number of sources mentioned above, such as art, the writings of Pliny, the influence of Roman mapping, and the beliefs and superstitions of the medieval world. The Map is an insight into medieval world, and acts as an encyclopaedia charting different historical events within. The Hereford Map is also an art work demonstrating that a map is not just a geographical representation of an area but that it can give a huge amount of historical insight
2014). Places organize our experience of the world and manage our relationship with other people.
GIS is an emerging method of data storage and interpretation. GIS is, simply put a database. It is many tables of data organized by one common denominator, location. The data in a GIS system is organized spatially, or by its physical location on the base map. The information that is stored in the database is the location and attributes that exist in that base map, such as streets, highways, water lines, sewers, manholes, properties, and buildings, etc. each of these items don’t just exist in the database, the attributes associated with the item is also stored. A good example of this would be a specific sewer line, from and arbitrary point A to a point B. Ideally, the sewer line would be represented graphically, with a line connecting the two points or something of the like. When one retrieves the information for that line in particular, the attribute data would be shown. This data would include the size of pipe, the pipe material, the upper invert elevation, the downstream invert elevation, the date installed, and any problem history associated with that line. This is the very gist of what a GIS system is.
Crime mapping is a fairly simple concept. The push-pin maps that can be seen in any police show are entering the digital era. Digital crime mapping software improves the police’s ability to respond to situations and analyze crime in leaps and bounds. What before might have taken different sets of eyes can now be done by entering in multiple sets of GPS co-ordinates. Crime mapping can be used to identify patterns in crime, as well as allow officers in the field to simultaneous view the same map, even as it is updated with new information. Imagine that each squad car has this map software installed and there is a search for a bank robber. There is a tip line open, and every single time a tip is confirmed this new location shows up on the map in the squad cars allowing the car closest to the siting to take off immediately. It also gives the rest of the on duty officers a glimpse at the robber’s supposed progress and any one of them might see a pattern emerging allowing them to lay in wait for the robber at his next stop.
The concept map made me better understand the social issue that I chose in many different ways. When using the concept map, I was able to view the social issue from different angles and different ways. Some people wanted school prayer in the schools because
Datasets of retails, bars, schools, churches, and recreational areas were also used to determine the likelihood of a robbery to take place. For the crime data, since robberies were the focus, the robberies were highlighted and exported as points on the map with the rest of the crime data removed to only show robberies. For hotel data sets, first the addresses of all hotels were listed on a spreadsheet followed by each hotels’ coordinates within the city. Then the spreadsheet was added to the map as a data set and turned into a shapefile that appears on the map. The techniques used to establish the spatial relationship between hotels and robberies was through the spatial analysis tools. This would be done using Euclidean Distancing to determine the distance correlation on how far robberies occur just around hotels and beyond the path its’ occupants and employees take. It is then broken up into 5 classes with class 1 being in proximity to the hotels and class 5 being the