16 February 2009

What Can You Do with GIS?

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.

Click to enlarge.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.

Click to enlarge.

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.

Why Use GIS?


Why Use GIS?

Your organization has new and legacy data stored in a variety of formats in many locations. You need a way to integrate your data so that you can analyze it as a whole and leverage it to make critical business and planning decisions.

GIS can integrate and relate any data with a spatial component, regardless of the source of the data. For example, you can combine the location of mobile workers, located in real-time by GPS devices, in relation to customers' homes, located by address and derived from your customer database. GIS maps this data, giving dispatchers a visual tool to plan the best routes for mobile staff or send the closest worker to a customer. This saves tremendous time and money.

Put Your Data to Work

Rather than you working hard to understand your data, GIS puts your data to work for you. GIS can provide you with powerful information—not just how things are, but how they will be in the future based on changes you apply. It has been used to solve problems as diverse as

What is GIS?

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.




Geography Matters

Geography plays a role in nearly every decision we make. Choosing sites, targeting market segments, planning distribution networks, responding to emergencies, or redrawing country boundaries—all of these problems involve questions of geography.

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.

Three Views of a GIS

A GIS is most often associated with a map. A map, however, is only one way you can work with geographic data in a GIS, and only one type of product generated by a GIS. A GIS can provide a great deal more problem-solving capabilities than using a simple mapping program or adding data to an online mapping tool (creating a "mash-up").

A GIS can be viewed in three ways:

  1. The Database View: A GIS is a unique kind of database of the world—a geographic database (geodatabase). It is an "Information System for Geography." Fundamentally, a GIS is based on a structured database that describes the world in geographic terms. Learn more.

    Example of geodata showing tabular address data related to a street map.
  2. The Map View: A GIS is a set of intelligent maps and other views that show features and feature relationships on the earth's surface. Maps of the underlying geographic information can be constructed and used as "windows into the database" to support queries, analysis, and editing of the information. Learn more.

  3. The Model View: A GIS is a set of information transformation tools that derive new geographic datasets from existing datasets. These geoprocessing functions take information from existing datasets, apply analytic functions, and write results into new derived datasets. Learn more.

    Example of a model or process flow, with datasets, functions, and results.

By combining data and applying some analytic rules, you can create a model that helps answer the question you have posed. In the example below, GPS and GIS were used to accurately model the expected location and distribution of debris for the Space Shuttle Columbia, which broke up upon re-entry over eastern Texas on February 1, 2003. Learn more about this project.

Together, these three views are critical parts of an intelligent GIS and are used at varying levels in all GIS applications. Learn more about the technology.

MapmyIndia receives $9 mn funding from Qualcomm Ventures

Qualcomm Ventures Invests $9 million in MapMyIndia

LBS MapMyIndia provides digital maps, location-based services and GPS navigation on handhelds and in cars. The investment, along with others from Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Sherpalo Ventures and Nexus India Capital may lead to expansion outside of India. A telling comment from MapmyIndia MD Rakesh Verma: "After the acquisition of Navteq, the field has been opened. We are examining and have plans for venturing overseas in 2010-11."

NEW DELHI: Digital maps and navigation services provider MapmyIndia has received $ 9 million funding from Qualcomm Ventures, the venture capital

arm of the global wireless technology major Qualcomm and a few other investors.

In a strategic partnership with Qualcomm, MapmyIndia will leverage the former's technology to strengthen its services in the country and explore overseas opportunities.

"Through the partnership, we will leverage Qualcomm's leading wireless technologies to grow in the telecom, automotive and internet ecosystems--handset manufacturers, mobile operators, automotive manufacturers, hardware vendors, chipset providers, and application developers," MapmyIndia MD Rakesh Verma told PTI.

Apart from Qualcomm Ventures, the other investors are Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Sherpalo Ventures and Nexus India Capital, who had invested USD 3 million earlier.

MapmyIndia is now looking at expanding its presence overseas as well.

"After the acquisition of Navteq, the field has been opened. We are examining and have plans for venturing overseas in 2010-11," Verma said declining to give further details.

MapmyIndia provides digital maps, location-based services and GPS navigation in the country on handheld devices, mobile phones and automobiles.
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