GIS Development

The development of GIS (Geographic Information System) was a result of several ideas taken in various unrelated sectors to study or solve certain problems. All of which led to a wealth of knowledge that resulted in the overall GIS development. Here are the major events that determined the development of GIS. Renowned analyst of transportation problems and geographer William Garrison thought of using computers and statistics to better understand and analyze spatial problems. This launched the "quantitative revolution" in geography. Waldo Tobler, a contributor in the Quantitative Revolution and student of Garrison, designed a model called MIMO (Map In – Map Out) in 1959 that would make computers beneficial in cartography. MIMO served as the basis for GIS and included all the major features of GIS software available and currently used today.

The term geographic information system was first used in 1968 by Roger Tomlinson, also considered as the "Father of GIS." The first true operational geographic information system was developed in 1960 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It was developed by Roger Tomlinson and was called CGIS (Canada Geographic Information System). It was used to study, control and store information gathered for the Canada Land Inventory to confirm rural Canada’s land capability by mapping data about recreation, soils, waterfowl, land use, forestry, wildlife and recreation at a 1:50,000 scale.

CGIS provided features for scanning/digitizing, measurement and overlay. It supported a nationwide coordinate system that covered the continent, stored the locational and attribute data in separate files and coded lines as arcs with an embedded topology. CGIS became a mainframe-based system to support provincial and federal resource management and planning, but it never became available commercially.

The Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis was established in 1964 by Howard T. Fisher where crucial theoretical concepts in handling spatial data were developed. 1970s saw the launch of seminal software systems and code like ODYSSEY, SYMAP and GRID to research centers, companies and universities worldwide. These functioned as sources for succeeding commercial development. Two public domain geographic information systems were developed in the late 1970s. M&S Computing, Bentley Systems Incorporated, Earth Resource Data Analysis System, Computer Aided Resource Information System, Environmental Systems Research Institute and MapInfo Corporation became commercial sellers of GIS software in the early 1980s and have successfully incorporated most of the CGIS features, effectively combining the first generation approach to separating attribute and spatial data with a second generation approach to managing attribute information into database structures.

The first desktop GIS product for the DOS operating system came out in 1986. It was called MIDAS (Mapping Display and Analysis System), but was renamed to MapInfo in 1990 when it was transferred to the Microsoft Windows platform. This started the process of moving geographic information system to the business environment from the research field.

The quick development in different systems had been combined and regulated on platforms by the end of the twentieth century. Users began to explore viewing information provided by the GIS over the internet and require transfer rules and data format. More and more open-source GIS products are running today on various operating systems and can be modified to perform certain tasks. A growing number of mapping and geospatial data applications are also being made available online.

One of the Pioneer GIS Projects center is the Gistic.

By Abdullah, working as project manager for a pioneer Gis Project Center. Visit: http://www.gistic.org