A Technology to Unify
............. environmental issues are inherently spatial—they occur somewhere, often affecting a geographic location or area—their spatial dimension needs to be captured if modelling and engineering are to be relevant in solving specific problems or avoiding future impacts. The youngest technology to draw into this recipe for a common language is geographic information systems (GIS)............
(Allan Brimicombe)
What is GIS?
The field of geographic information systems (GISs) is emerging as one of today’s most exciting and progressive technical areas. GIS technology has evolved during the past four decades and is only now starting to penetrate major industry and service hubs. With such a wide array of new users, there exists not only considerable interest in GIS but also a fair amount of uncertainty and misunderstanding surrounding the discipline.
This discipline came to fore during the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, which marked a milestone in how information is used and portrayed. For the first time ever, analysts used geographic information systems (GISs) to generate election maps that showed which presidential candidate was leading in each county in every state throughout the country. This information was well received by political analysts and home viewers alike, though few understood the thing called GIS. The perception of GIS in the business world goes much the same way. Many engineers, environmentalists, and business professionals who use GIS do not necessarily know how it works.
GIS has been around for nearly four decades but has gained a true user backing only within the past 10 years. With technical and industry professionals becoming aware of GIS’s capability and benefits, the dedicated following of developers and users is now growing. The next 10 years will mark new milestones in geographic information, while everyday life will continue to embed with GIS applications.
GIS is a system managing geographic information. Information becomes geographic information when it is tagged with a location in terms of latitude and longitude. Many of the phenomenon, from pollution to pollination; forest fire to oil sleek; tsunami and earthquake, happen over the earth surface which could be located in terms of latitude and longitude. Another important capability a GIS posses is its ability to manage projections. Projections are the basic method of conversion to show a complex three dimensional (earth) surface into a two dimensional map. These two capabilities and specific analytical potentials make GIS a unique and a common system to address a variety of environmental problems.
A Lecture from IIT- Roorke prof:
