Geography matters! How GIS touches all our lives daily

By Ashani Jayasinghe-Dabare

Geography matters – Geographical Information Systems (GIS) touches all our lives, every day. During the past six decades, a powerful technology has quietly changed the way people view and live in their neighbourhoods, towns, and cities especially in the developed world. This technology is GIS. 

Beginnings of GIS

The year 1960 saw the development of the world’s first true operational GIS in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada by the federal Department of Forestry and Rural Development. Developed by Dr. Roger Tomlinson, it was called the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) and was used to store, analyse, and manipulate data collected for the Canada Land Inventory – an effort to determine the land capability for rural Canada by mapping information about soils, agriculture, recreation, wildlife, waterfowl, forestry and land use at a scale of 1:50,000. A rating classification factor was also added to permit analysis.

CGIS was an improvement over “computer mapping” applications as it provided capabilities for overlay, measurement, and digitising/scanning. It supported a national coordinate system that spanned the continent, coded lines as arcs having a true embedded topology and it stored the attribute and locational information in separate files. As a result of this, Tomlinson has become known as the “father of GIS”, particularly for his use of overlays in promoting the spatial analysis of convergent geographic data. 

He together with CGIS lasted into the 1990s and built a large digital land resource database in Canada. It was developed as a mainframe-based system in support of federal and provincial resource planning and management. Its strength was continent-wide analysis of complex datasets. The CGIS was never available commercially.

In 1964 Howard T. Fisher formed the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (LCGSA 1965–1991), where a number of important theoretical concepts in spatial data handling were developed, and which by the 1970s had distributed seminal software code and systems, such as SYMAP, GRID, and ODYSSEY – that served as sources for subsequent commercial development—to universities, research centres and corporations worldwide.

By the late 1970s two public domain GIS systems (MOSS and GRASS GIS) were in development, and by the early 1980s, M&S Computing (later Intergraph) along with Bentley Systems Incorporated for the CAD platform, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), CARIS (Computer Aided Resource Information System), MapInfo Corporation and ERDAS (Earth Resource Data Analysis System) emerged as commercial vendors of GIS software, successfully incorporating many of the CGIS features, combining the first generation approach to separation of spatial and attribute information with a second generation approach to organising attribute data into database structures. 

GIS today

 GIS market space since then and GIS Technology is now a multi-billion dollar business. This is the case with many technologies where most people remain unaware of GIS and its impact. An impact that is far ranging as it is useful - despite GIS having grown immensely in the last 25+ years, despite hundreds of thousands of people now using the technology and despite it affecting the daily lives of millions. 

To prove this, let’s follow a daily routine of someone in a more tech savvy developed nation, and see how GIS helps in ways that you would have never suspected. 

Examples

The clock radio rings at 6:00 a.m. You get up and turn on the lights.

The radio and lights are powered with household electricity. A typical electric utility company serving millions of customers uses GIS to manage its complex infrastructure consisting of tens of thousands of miles of transmission and distribution lines and hundreds of thousands of utility poles, as well as thousands of employees maintaining optimal service at hundreds of sites.

In the kitchen you pour 

some fresh fruit juice.

The fruit trees were grown with water provided by an irrigation district serving the agricultural community. The district serves thousands of farmers and maintains hundreds of miles of waterways. It uses GIS for engineering and operations and for powerful digital mapping.

You put on a pot of coffee.

The water the coffee is made with is provided by a water utility operating a water distribution system that consists of thousands of miles of water mains. The utility uses GIS for customer service, emergency response, water distribution, infrastructure maintenance, automated mapping, network tracing, flow analysis, and other aspects of engineering, operations, administration, and finance.

The coffee grounds get chewed up by the garbage disposal.

The water utility also maintains a water/wastewater collection system consisting of hundreds of miles of sanitary sewers and storm drains and uses GIS in tandem with its water delivery system.

You go outside, pick up the 

morning newspaper, and head back into your house.

The wood that was the source for the paper and for the lumber of the house was provided by wood product companies that use GIS for sound forest management practices. GIS makes easily available for analysis property boundaries, vegetation, soil analysis, roads, streams, public land survey, contours, watershed, and sensitive areas, allowing forest managers to make the best informed decisions. The newspaper circulation department uses GIS to understand the dynamics and demographics of carrier routes, the basic unit used to report and study circulation. After finding areas where actual subscriptions were low but potential was high, those areas were targeted with subscription sales efforts, doubling the new subscriptions of the previous year.

You pile the kids into the car and stop at the gas station.

GIS technology integrates all kinds of petroleum information and applications into a common system and lets the oil companies view that information in context on a map for exploration, operation and maintenance, production, environment, land lease management, and data management. Before the oil becomes gasoline it needs to move from the oil fields to the processing plant via pipelines. The pipeline industry uses GIS for assisting route planning and construction, operations, supply market analysis, and reporting functions.

You drop the kids off at school.

The attendance boundaries of the school were drawn using GIS. Not long ago, the school board needed to make allowances for hundreds of new kids from the new subdivisions being built in the area. A new school was required. The board used GIS to develop a system to view different possible boundaries right in their public meetings, exploring alternatives to splitting the neighbourhood.

You drive to work.

The roads are safer because of GIS. The community uses GIS for managing its transportation infrastructure. GIS is used to support planning, inventory, design, construction, operations, and maintenance. More than 80% of the information used to manage road, rail, and port facilities has a spatial component. GIS can be used to determine the location of an event or asset and its relationship or proximity to another event or asset, which may be the critical factor leading to a decision about design, construction, or maintenance.

Your employer is the local 

phone company.

GIS technology assists local service telephone companies in better tracking the location and characteristics of their outside infrastructure, improving access to information when engineering new projects, improving the ability to plan for additional capacity by forecasting future growth, optimising coverage of their mobile networks, and supporting customer service routing and dispatch operations. In the deregulated and increasingly competitive environment faced by telephone companies, this flexibility in information management and analysis is critical.

The telecom industry is also in the midst of a vast program aimed at deploying a new broadband network. This program will extend into the next decade and will increase the capacity to deliver telephone, analogue and digital video, video on demand, and interactive video services. The industry adopted GIS technology to support the design, implementation, and management of the new network.

You receive a package from an overnight courier.

GIS solutions for transportation fleet and logistics management exist in the areas of routing, customer service, crew management, street and rail network management, and vehicle/depot management. Knowing where a vehicle, pickup, or delivery is at any given time leverages assets for optimum deployment and cost savings.

As you can see GIS has been there nearly every step of the way, helping make life more comfortable and safe. All through the power of geography! Geography matters to all of us, and GIS technology is the way to gain the advantage. To learn more about how GIS affects you, visit www.gis.com.

(The writer is CEO of GIS Solutions and Subsidiary of Just In Time Group.)