GIS allows us to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualise data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts. A GIS helps you answer questions and solve problems by looking at your data in a way that is quickly understood and easily shared. GIS technology can be integrated into any enterprise information system framework.

Instead, realise that a GIS is a platform for capturing, managing, manipulating and visualising geographic information. This platform technology brings together information from many fields and sciences – physical, social, cultural and design – and integrates the resulting geographical knowledge across disciplines through mapping and modeling of spatial relationships and patterns. GIS is the glue that integrates many different types of data. It allows you to see data on a map and analyse it to reveal patterns, relationships and trends not readily apparent in tabular data. Without GIS it would be almost impossible to collect large volumes of information about observable events, and then build and test theories about patterns and processes. Or, to summarise all this in the words of Steve Kopp, lead software developer for scientific tools at ESRI, ‘GIS is basically creating new data from data you already have. The traditional role of GIS is finding the best place to put something or find something, and very similar techniques also apply to scientific applications.’

GIS has long been used by governments for urban planning and by utilities (for example, where does one place mobile phone antennas to get the best coverage?). In the sciences, GIS is gaining use in diverse areas, examples being global climate change, solar panel placement and efficiency studies, epidemiological studies, oil/gas exploration – and even archeology.

        

         

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 Geography is the science of our world.  Coupled with GIS, geography is helping us to better understand the earth and apply geographic knowledge to a host of human activities.  The outcome is the emergence of The Geographic Approach—a new way of thinking and problem solving that integrates geographic information into how we understand and manage our planet. This approach allows us to create geographic knowledge by measuring the earth, organising this data, and analysing and modeling various processes and their relationships. The Geographic Approach also allows us to apply this knowledge to the way we design, plan, and change our world.

Any organisation has new and legacy data stored in a variety of formats in many locations. They need a way to integrate your data so that you can analyse it as a whole and leverage it to make critical business and planning decisions.

GIS can integrate and relate any data with a spatial component, regardless of the source of the data. For example, you can combine the location of mobile workers, located in real-time by GPS devices, in relation to customers' homes, located by address and derived from your customer database. GIS maps this data, giving dispatchers a visual tool to plan the best routes for mobile staff or send the closest worker to a customer. This saves tremendous time and money.

Rather than you working hard to understand your data, GIS puts your data to work for you. GIS can provide you with powerful information—not just how things are, but how they will be in the future based on changes you apply. It has been used to solve problems as diverse as

·         Determining where to place self-service coin counting machines

·         Visualising and planning how to improve the yield of crops in a traditional Tuscan vineyard

·         Sharing and managing information for  an entire city enterprise

GIS has demonstrated real business value, or return on investment (ROI). During the last 30 years companies, agencies, academic institutions, and governments worldwide have implemented GIS programmes to take advantage of these benefits.

See how users in different industries and disciplines have used GIS effectively to solve problems and improve processes. Learn best practices from peers in your industry and get ideas on how you can implement GIS in your organisation or community.

INDUSTRY'S GROWTH The Indian Geospatial industry saw its inception around two decades ago. A broad chronology of the movement of Geospatial sciences in India may be visualised in four phases. At all phases, the movement remained linked to developments in academia as well as industry - anyone following the other. The first is introduction and application of GIS in few researches in multiple academic disciplines/professional courses as Forestry (green cover estimation), Geology (mineral maps), Agriculture (crop disease estimation), Civil Engineering, etc. It became more and more the part of analysis processes. This later on led to addition of GIS modules/ courses to these. It also became a part of curriculum of traditional Geography courses.