Most people wouldn't go to a foreign country or city without first consulting a guide book or a map. The fact is that to organise many of our day to day activities we need to know how things are organised in space – in other words where they are. Either implicitly or explicitly we each use geography to optimise how we interact with our physical environment.
Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, provide a systematic means of organising information about our world so that government, business and increasingly individuals can understand what is happening at a given location, predict what the impact of their actions might be at that location and communicate their objectives for a location.
We have long sought a technology that can integrate the many disparate pieces of information that we hold about our environment. Geography provides one such integrative mechanism and this is exploited by GIS. GIS use location to index, search and retrieve the disparate information that we usually catalogue thematically.
Using GIS we can combine information such as the location of health centres with the location of patients, or the location of mobile phone masts with the location of customers, or the location of fish with the location of fishing vessels to ensure that we optimise service provision, increase customer satisfaction and promote sustainability.
The bottom line is that if you want to know where things are, where they have been or where they should be you should think GIS.
