Importance Of GIS

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“What is GIS?”
Geographic information science (GIS) is a multidisciplinary field, which is flourished over past three decades [1]. As a scientific discipline, GIS helps the process of understanding spatial issues. It is used to record, manage, integrate, manipulate, analyze, and present the geographic information [1,2]. Taking advantage of these powerful functions, GIS has been widely used in various fields [3].
“System or Science?”
In the early 1960s, the geographer Roger Tomlinson, the “father of GIS”, first coined the term “geographic information system” [4]. At that time, GIS was regard as tools, techniques to handle the geo-data. Then, some scientists proposed that GIS should be a subdiscipline of geography or computer science. In their …show more content…

In 1997, Dawn J. Wright summarized an online discussion about this topic [5]. A bunch of relevant experts participated in the discussion. All their opinions were classified into three categories: GIS as a tool, as toolmaking, and as science. People, who support “GIS as a tool”, think GIS should belong to engineering for solving problems rather than to science. It is driven by the human practical needs. Those who viewed GIS as toolmaking believed that GIS is the process of creating tools and the tools can help users to better understand the geographic information. The rest of people who support “GIS as science” mainly claimed that GIS is a body of knowledge or method to discover and understand spatial theories. It governed how to measure, collect data, organize data, create the spatial models, and do spatial/temporal analysis, et al [2,5]. Although GIS has a close relationship with some disciplines (such as geography, cartography, geometrics, mathematic, statistics, information sciences, and computer science, et al), it has unique properties, questions, and aims to understand spatial theories. They insisted that GIS should be an independent scientific discipline [1, 2, …show more content…

The first phases, in the early 1970s, GIS was mainly about computer mapping. In the 1980s, with the changing of data format and development of computer environment, more attention was given to spatial database management. In the 1990s, geospatial analysis and modeling become the hottest research topic [4]. Michael Frank Goodchild has listed eight research topics, which he thought should be included in the GIS research field, in his 1992 paper [2]. These eight topics include 1) Data collection and measurement; 
 2) Data capture; 
3) Spatial statistics; 
4) Data modeling and theories of spatial data; 5) Data structures, algorithms, and processes; 6) Display; 7) Analytical tools; and
 8) Institutional, managerial, and ethical

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