Written by admin
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Introduction
Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computer based information system used to digitally represent and analyse the geographic features present on the Earth’ surface and the events (non-spatial attributes linked to the geography under study) that taking place on it. The meaning to represent digitally is to convert analog (smooth line) into a digital form.
“Every object present on the Earth can be geo-referenced”, is the fundamental key of associating any database to GIS. Here, term ‘database’ is a collection of information about things and their relationship to each other, and ‘geo-referencing’ refers to the location of a layer or coverage in space defined by the co-ordinate referencing system.
Work on GIS began in late 1950s, but first GIS software came only in late 1970s from the lab of the ESRI. Canada was the pioneer in the development of GIS as a result of innovations dating back to early 1960s. Much of the credit for the early development of GIS goes to Roger Tomilson. Evolution of GIS has transformed and revolutionized the ways in which planners, engineers, managers etc. conduct the database management and analysis.
