Geographic information systems, or GIS, are software frameworks for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying data related to positions on the Earth’s surface. Enabled by advances in satellite imagery as well as data science, GIS allows for the integration of many types of geospatial datasets such as buildings, vegetation, and natural resources. GIS applications have quickly become an important tool for a wide variety of industries that can benefit from the combination of data analysis with mapping.
For example, GIS tools are increasingly used in the agricultural sector to combine satellite imagery with data from remote sensors and farming equipment to improve yields through more precise decision-making around cultivation and harvesting. It is an important tool for environmental protection as well, allowing potential ecological hazards to be identified and even predicted in advance using artificial intelligence (AI), as well as informing water and wildlife conservation initiatives.
GIS approaches are also important for delivering insights about the man-made world, providing a common framework to bring together data about places, populations, and economies and discover patterns and relationships between them. For example, urban planners use GIS systems to examine how transportation networks in a city function and how to improve them to reduce congestion or support economic development. GIS systems are also invaluable tools for military and intelligence applications, as they can reveal critical insights about other countries’ activities - whether in peacetime or wartime.