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A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Much of this often happens within a spatial database ; however, this is not essential to meet the definition of a GIS. [ 1 ]
Location information (known by the many names mentioned here) is stored in a geographic information system (GIS). There are also many different types of geodata, including vector files , raster files , geographic databases , web files, and multi-temporal data.
Geographic information science (GIScience, GISc) or geoinformation science is a scientific discipline at the crossroads of computational science, social science, and natural science that studies geographic information, including how it represents phenomena in the real world, how it represents the way humans understand the world, and how it can be captured, organized, and analyzed.
The software component of a traditional geographic information system is expected to provide a wide range of functions for handling spatial data: [11]: 16 Data management, including the creation, editing, and storage of geographic data, as well as transformations such as changing coordinate systems and converting between raster and vector models.
The earliest computer systems that represented geographic phenomena were quantitative analysis models developed during the quantitative revolution in geography in the 1950s and 1960s; these could not be called a geographic information system because they did not attempt to store geographic data in a consistent permanent structure, but were usually statistical or mathematical models.
QGIS is a geographic information system (GIS) software that is free and open-source. [2] QGIS supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. [3] It supports viewing, editing, printing, and analysis of geospatial data in a range of data formats. Its name comes from an abbreviation of its previous name, Quantum GIS.
The Geographic Information Science and Technology group of Oak Ridge National Laboratory is supported by various government departments and agencies including the United States Department of Energy. It is currently the only group in the United States Department of Energy National Laboratory System to focus on advanced theory and application ...
See Ray Larson’s book Geographic information retrieval and spatial browsing [20] for references to much of the pre-Web literature on GIR. In 2005 the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum added a geographic track, GeoCLEF. GeoCLEF was the first TREC-style evaluation forum for GIR systems and provided participants a chance to compare systems. [21]