About GIS allows you to familiarize with what people mean for GIS, and how this field is evolving.

What is GIS?

Geographic Information Science, often called Geographical Information Systems, is a subset of computer science. A cross disciplinary field where spatial information is mapped out and where people make measurements, acquire spatial data, and analyze them in order to extract information, develop geospatial models, make transformations across different frameworks, visualize and build analytical solutions; observe change over time and carry out prediction. (Lovison-Golob, 2002).

Other definitions are:

Geographical Information Systems is set of tools for storing and retrieving at will, transforming and displaying spatial data from the real world for a particular set of purposes. (Peter Burrough, 1986)

A special information system, where the database consists of observations on spatially distributed features, activities or events which are definable in space as points, line or areas. (Dueker, 1979)A GIS manipulates these data.

Examples of applications from Harvard:

Traffic study on New Dehli, India, carried out by Professor Peter Rogers, Division of Applied Sciences, 2001.