Geographical Information Systems are computerized systems for the storage, retrieval, manipulation, analysis, and display of geographical referenced data. If these systems include physical, biological, cultural or economic information they are very valuable tools in the natural, social, medical and engineering science, as well as business and planning. So, this research provides some recognition and application of the GIS which is one of the very important areas to implement to solve some major geographical problems.
History of GIS
The GIS field began in the second half of the 20th century, when computer programmers discovered that maps could be made by changing data into code. The year 1962 saw the development of the world’s first true operational GIS in Ottawa, Canada by the federal department of Forestry and Rural Development. It was called “Canada Geographic Information System” (CGIS) and was used to store, analyze, and manipulate data for the Canada Land Inventory (CLI). They used it to determine the land capability for rural Canada by mapping information about soil, agriculture, recreation, wildlife, waterfowl, forestry, and land use at a scale of 1: 50,000
Why it is important?
The life of every creature in the world has bound tightly with the environment. Anyone cannot stay out of this amazing environment. Why GIS is so important this much to us is it provides powerful tools for addressing geographical and environment issues such as hurricanes, disasters like tsunami, and earthquakes etc. Just imagine what you know about the swamp area at the end of your street. With a GIS you can point at the location, object, or area on the screen and retrieve recorded information about the swamp.
Using scanned aerial photographs as a visual guide, you can ask a GIS about the geology or hydrology of the area or even about how close a swamp is to the end of a street. So this type of analysis allows you to drawing conclusions and making decisions. That is why GIS is very important to the world.
On the other hand, though the databases are the effective way of storing of data they are not easy to interpret. So the advancement of the GIS is can be easily interpret and easy to understand even for ordinary person. So using databases and maps together provides very effective way of interpreting and visualizing information
Applications of the GIS
GIS technology is widely used for scientific investigations, resource management, archaeology, environment impact assessment, criminology, geographic history, marketing, logistics, prospectivity mapping and other purposes. As an example GIS might allow emergency planners to easily calculate emergency response times in the event of a natural disaster like tsunami. GIS might be used to find wetlands that need protection from pollution and for other business solutions.
Once a GIS was used to combine the road network and earth science information to analyze the effect of an earthquake on the response time of fire and rescue squads. But nowadays almost all the western countries take help of GIS not only to find solutions for the environmental issues but also for the facilities management, land management, and street- networks. Following are the brief indication of major applications of GIS.
- Natural resource management
- Wildlife habitat
- Flood plains
- Wetlands
- Agricultural lands
- Forests
- Facilities Management
- Locating underground pipes and cables
- Tracking energy use
- Load balancing in electrical networks
- Planning facility maintenance
- Street networks
- Address matching
