GIS Services

This guide provides some basic information bout GIS, data types, data resources, project planning, software and hardware and links to resources like books, periodicals and more.

For basic information about GIS and what it can be used for please click on the About GIS tab and subtabs to the left.

For details about project planning, what questions to ask when starting a project and guidance on analysis and cartographic output,  please click on the GIS Project Planning tab and subtabs.

The Books and Journals tab provides links to online and print books and GIS-related periodicals available through Richardson Library

For links to online  data please click on the Find Data tab.

          GIS has extensive applications in many disciplines, so it is difficult to generalize a set of "rules" for determining when it is best used as opposed to other analytic and visualization techniques.  

         However, after formalizing a research question there are a few questions you can ask to guide your decision to use GIS:

What is it?

• Does answering the question depend on identifying what exists at one or more locations?  Examples include describing locations in terms of what is there like population and other demographic variables, or distributions of plant and animal species, or types of industrial and commercial firms. 

Where is it?

• Does answering the question depend on how a trend or characteristics varies from one place to another? Examples include identifying differences in population density, racial composition, or real estate values in different neighborhoods; or how do mineral mining and exports vary from one country to another.

What has changed over time from past to present? 

• Does answering the question depend on understanding how a trend or characteristic changes in one or more places over time?  Examples include how have demographic variables changed in different neighborhoods from 1960 to present

Are things connected over space?

• Does answering the question depend on identifying locations where a trend or characteristic is likely to exist?  For example, we can infer where will be a good location for a new grocery store to mitigate the effects of a food desert on food security or a service center for likely populations.
• Similarly, does answering the question depend on inferring influential relationships between one trend or characteristic and another nearby?  For example, how might health be influenced by environmental factors like heavy industry or high-traffic areas; or what factors are associated with high-crime areas?

What kind of changes can we anticipate in the future ("What if...?")

• Does answering the question depend on how one trend or characteristic will change under the influence of new trend characteristic?  For example we might infer what will happen to traffic flow and volume in a given location if a bicycle lane is added to a street?

GIS is used for "collecting, analyzing, visualizing and maintaining data about location."  This definition also traces the history and antecedents of GIS starting with Cartography in the ancient world.  One of the earliest maps yet discovered dates from circa 6,500 BC and shows a town that was once situated at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, with a volcano erupting over it.   In the thousands of years since then maps have been used to show the features and locations on the Earth and help people understand where they are and where they are going.

          An important story in the origins of GIS is the development of spatial analysis in the 1850s, when Dr. John Snow developed a map of Cholera incidences in London.  By mapping the locations of Cholera incidences and by studying the behavior of people who drank water from a nearby well, Dr. Snow was able to infer that contaminated water supplied by the well was the source of the Cholera outbreak and made a convincing case for turning the well off.   Dr. Snow's research represent foundational contributions to Spatial Analysis, Epidemiology and the Germ Theory of disease transmission.

Developments leading to GIS accelerated in the years after World War II, and most notably include what is known in Geography and the Social Sciences as the "Quantitative Revolution" which changed the perspectives of these disciplines away from idiographic or static, descriptive, narrative-based approaches toward the nomothetic perspective, which focuses on generalizing laws about processes that are derived from rigorous scientific methods and explain the way things change over time, such as when researchers develop a model of a process. 

          A parallel development was the invention of digital computers which provided a means for automating the collection, processing and analysis of these data.

          Although there are early examples of computer-based spatial analysis and visualization like the Federal Census Bureau which used punch card computers to tabulate population data since 1890 , the Canada Geographic Information System developed by Roger Tomlinson in the 1960s is generally accepted as the first GIS .  Canada's vast territory and extensive natural resources, and the need top manage them at close scale, motivated the development of this system, and included among its processes the digitizing of aerial images and identifying land-uses.

            Nearly contemporary with this development was the Synagraphic Mapping System or SYMAP developed by Howard Fisher in 1964 at Harvard University.  Two succeeding developments were ODYSSEY in 1979 which more closely resembles the GIS software that is popular today, but its proprietor went bankrupt before the software could be widely distributed; and GRID developed by Environmental System Research Institute (ESRI) which used satellite and aerial images to represent spatial data, and later developed program called Planning Information Overlay System.  The advent of micro-computing in the late 1970s and early 1980s introduced more opportunities to develop GIS software for a greater range of applications and for people with a variety of background and research interests.  ESRI took advantage of this development and produced ARCINFO which became very popular and ESRI became an industry leader.  

         Other widely used  GIS platforms include Maptitude by the Caliper Corporation which is used widely in transportation analysis, and QGIS formerly Quantum GIS, which is likely the most widely used open source GIS platform.