Geosciences and Remote Sensing

GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM

A Geographic Information System (or GIS) is a system designed to store, capture, manipulate, manage, analyse, and present geographical or  spatial data. The acronym GIS is sometimes used for the geographic information science (GIS) to refer to the academic discipline that studies the geographic information systems and it is a large domain within the broader academic discipline of geoinformatics. What goes beyond a GIS is spatial data infrastructure, a concept that has no such restrictive boundaries. In general, the term describes any information system that stores, integrates, analyses, edits, shares, and displays the geographic information. GIS applications are the tools that allow users to create interactive queries, edit data in maps, analyse spatial information, and present the results of all these operations. GIS science is the science underlying applications, geographic concepts, and systems.

GIS is a broad term that can refer to a number of different processes, technologies and methods. It is attached to many operations and has many applications related to planning, engineering, transport/logistics, management, telecommunications, insurance, and business. For that reason, GIS and location intelligence applications can be the foundation for many location-enabled services that rely on visualization and analysis.