Geographic Information Systems
Submitted by on January 1, 1998
Category: Technology
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GIS: Strategic Planning and Management Through
The Application of Computer Technology
On the walls of caves near Lascaux, France, Cro-Magnon hunters drew pictures of the animals they hunted 35,000 years ago. Associated with the animal drawings is a map; track lines and tallies thought to depict migration routes. These early records followed the two-element structure of modern geographic information systems: a graphic file linked to an attribute database.
The map has been in existence in much the same form for thousands of years. In the traditional form it suffers from a number of problems. Firstly, maps are static and therefore difficult and expensive to keep up to date. This leads to a second problem, in that because they are static they lose flexibility, for example, maps exist as discrete sheets and inevitably your area of interest...