What is GIS?

A geographic information system (GIS) integrates hardware, software, and data for
capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced
information.

GIS allows us to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in many ways
that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and
charts.

A GIS helps you answer questions and solve problems by looking at your data in a way
that is quickly understood and easily shared.

GIS technology can be integrated into any enterprise information system framework.

What Can You Do with GIS?

Map Where Things Are

Mapping where things are lets you find places that have the features you're 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—Looking at the distribution of features on the map instead of
just an individual feature, you can see patterns emerge.
 Maps of the locations of earthquake shaking
hazards are essential to creating and updating
building codes used in the United States.
Online, interactive earthquake maps, as well as
seismicity and fault data, are available at
earthquake.usgs.gov.

Map Quantities

People map quantities, like 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.

This map shows the number of children under 18 per clinically

active pediatrician for a particular study area. It was created by the
Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical
School as part of an effort to develop a national U.S. database of
primary care resources and health services.

For example, a catalog company selling children's clothes would

want to find ZIP Codes not only around their store, but those ZIP Codes with many
young families with relatively high income. Or, public health officials might not only
want to map physicians, but also map the numbers of physicians per 1,000 people in each
census tract to see which areas are adequately served, and which are not.

Map Densities

While you can see concentrations by simply mapping the locations of features, in areas
with many features it may be difficult to see which areas have a higher concentration than
others. A density map lets you measure the number of features using a uniform areal unit,
such as acres or square miles, so you can clearly see the distribution.

Mapping density is especially useful when mapping areas, such as census tracts or
counties, which vary greatly in size. On maps showing the number of people per census
tract, the larger tracts might have more people than smaller ones. But some smaller tracts
might have more people per square mile—a higher density.

This map shows population density in the east Asian

and
Indian Ocean regions.

Find What's Inside

Use GIS to monitor what's happening and to take specific action by mapping what's
inside a specific area. For example, a district attorney would monitor drug-related arrests
to find out if an arrest is within 1,000 feet of a school--if so, stiffer penalties apply.

This image from The Sanborn Map Company, Inc., shows a geoprocessed sample
explosion radius around an area in California. Each separate zone represents 1/4-mile, the
outermost perimeter being 1 mile away from the source.

Find What's Nearby

Find out what's occurring within a set distance of a feature by mapping what's nearby.

The Pacific Disaster Center has developed and applied a Vulnerability-Exposure-

Sensitivity-Resilience model to map people and facilities (what's nearby) exposed to
flood risk in the Lower Mekong River Basin (the feature).

Map Change

Map the change in an area to anticipate future conditions, decide on a course of action, or
to evaluate the results of an action or policy.
 1. By mapping where and how things move over a period of time, you can gain
insight into how they behave. For example, a meteorologist might study the paths
of hurricanes to predict where and when they might occur in the future.
2. Map change to anticipate future needs. For example, a police chief might study
how crime patterns change from month to month to help decide where officers
should be assigned.
3. Map conditions before and after an action or event to see the impact. A retail
analyst might map the change in store sales before and after a regional ad
campaign to see where the ads were most effective.

These images are from a poster titled "Losing Cape Cod," which is distributed by the
Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The poster shows the
severe change in land use on Cape Cod since 1951. The image on the left shows the town
of Barnstable in 1951 and the image on the right shows Barnstable in 1999.

Who Uses GIS?

Thousands of organizations use GIS to solve problems and improve processes. Learn best
practices and get ideas on how you can implement GIS in your organization or
community.
See how businesses, governments, educators and scientists, environmental and
conservation organizations, natural resource groups, and utilities benefit from using
GIS.

Business
Banking

Financial analysts employ GIS for targeting their markets by

visualizing service needs. Companies including Metropolitan Life and Chase Manhattan
Bank rely on GIS software to help them improve operational excellence and profitability.
Learn more.

Insurance

Many insurance companies have made GIS a central component of their business, using it
to visualize, analyze, and distribute risk. Companies such as CHUBB Insurance use GIS
software for portfolio risk management. Learn more.

Logistics

Logistics management requires planning the distribution fleet's

activities, route locations, and schedules. Argentina's telephone company, Grupo
Telefónica, uses the GIS logistics routing solution shown to the right to increase the
number of daily deliveries without increasing resources. Learn more.
Media

GIS is used by media bureaus for everything from analyzing

circulation and attracting advertisers to creating the maps used in the material itself. The
Associated Press (AP), USA TODAY, and National Geographic Society use GIS
software to create accurate maps quickly for magazines, newspapers, and online news
services. GIS maps can help the media keep the public informed about street closures or
openings and other emergency services, as in this map of lower Manhattan from the AP.
Learn more.

Real Estate

From map-based contact management to sophisticated investment

analysis in large real estate investment trusts, real estate agencies rely heavily on
electronic mapping. Many realtors have found great success in using the Internet to
market properties. Companies such as SSR Realty Advisors, Inc. use GIS in commercial
real estate, while REALTOR.com uses GIS to bring maps online to 1.2 million people
shopping for a new home. Learn more.

Retail Business

Businesses maintain information about sales, customers,

inventory, demographic profiles, and mailing lists, all of which have geographic
locations. Therefore, business managers, marketing strategists, financial analysts, and
professional planners increasingly rely on GIS to organize, analyze, and present their
business data.
Companies such as Sears have saved millions of dollars by managing deliveries with
GIS. Gold's Gym Enterprises uses GIS to study new franchise locations. Smaller
companies, such as Ultra Marine Kayaking of Santa Cruz, California, find GIS useful and
cost-effective for creating accurate and attractive maps for promotional materials.
Learn more.

Government
National Government

Government agencies trust GIS technology to establish and

regulate policy and to strengthen the welfare of their citizens. GIS is also an intelligent
means for agencies to provide public information. The U.S. government relies heavily on
GIS to evaluate the results of U.S. Census 2000. The city of Madrid, Spain, uses GIS to
create its Plan General de Ordenación Urbana to link documents and image files to map
features for an integrated view of information. Learn more.

Local Government

Revenue collection, economic development, and public information are just a few
opportunities that GIS affords municipalities. The cities of Madrid, Geneva, and Paris all
use GIS for providing many city services. Bregenze, a small township in Austria, uses
GIS to meet the needs of its 12 government departments. Learn more.

Homeland Security

GIS assets at local, regional, and national levels are used in

emergency response in the areas of detection, risk assessment, mitigation and prevention,
preparedness, response, and recovery. Utilized in both natural and human-induced
disasters, GIS has merged into the common operating procedures for public safety and
emergency response activities. City, county, state, and federal-level agencies use GIS as a
common framework for organizing and sharing data in a digital world. Learn more.
Military Defense

Military defense uses GIS for intelligence, terrain analysis,

mission planning, and facilities management. Geographic analysis is critical in military
operations, tactical or logistical planning, and infrastructure management. Sweden
integrates global positioning systems (GPS) into its mobile GIS for a mine-clearing
management system in Bosnia. Learn more.

Fire/Emergency Medical Services/Disaster

GIS allows public safety personnel to effectively plan for

emergency response, determine mitigation priorities, analyze historical events, and
predict future events. Wilson Fire/Rescue Services in Wilson, North Carolina, uses GIS
to get critical information to incident responders upon dispatch or while en route to an
emergency to assist in tactical planning. Learn more.

Law Enforcement

GIS is an effective crime-fighting tool. Police analysts use GIS

for planning and event modeling, tactical and strategic planning, and incident mapping.
The Chicago Police Department Informative Collection of Automated Mapping (ICAM)
gives all police officers access to information about crime throughout the city. Learn
more.
Health

Effective health care services management uses GIS not only to

show what resources and needs exist but also where to find them. Health experts also put
GIS to work in epidemiological and public health monitoring. They can geographically
track public health indicators, identify disease clusters, and explore sites of
environmental risk. For example, public health departments use GIS for mosquito
abatement programs. The state of Pennsylvania offers an online Web site for its West
Nile Virus Surveillance Program. Learn more.

Transportation

GIS serves three distinct transportation needs: infrastructure

management, fleet and logistics management, and transit management. GIS offers insight
for network planning and analysis, vehicle tracking and routing, inventory tracking, and
route planning analysis. The city of Budapest, having 20,000 to 30,000 unexpected road
repairs a year, relies heavily on its GIS to help plan, coordinate, manage, and complete
repair work in a timely fashion. Learn more.

A Framework for GIS Analysis

Step 1: Ask

Step 2: Acquire

Step 3: Examine

Step 4: Analyze

Step 5: Act

Geography is the science of our world. Coupled with GIS, geography is helping us to
better understand the earth and apply geographic knowledge to a host of human
activities. The outcome is the emergence of The Geographic Approach—a new way of
thinking and problem solving that integrates geographic information into how we
understand and manage our planet. This approach allows us to create geographic
knowledge by measuring the earth, organizing this data, and analyzing and modeling
various processes and their relationships. The Geographic Approach also allows us to
apply this knowledge to the way we design, plan, and change our world.