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A geographic information system or geographical information system (GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial or geographical data. The acronym GIS is sometimes used for geographic information science (GIScience) to refer to the academic discipline that studies geographic information systems and is a large domain within the broader academic discipline of Geoinformatics.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/intro/intro.html )〕 What goes beyond a GIS is a spatial data infrastructure, a concept that has no such restrictive boundaries. In a general sense, the term describes any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyzes, shares, and displays geographic information. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries (user-created searches), analyze spatial information, edit data in maps, and present the results of all these operations.〔Clarke, K. C., 1986. Advances in geographic information systems, computers, environment and urban systems, Vol. 10, pp. 175–184.〕 Geographic information science is the science underlying geographic concepts, applications, and systems. GIS is a broad term that can refer to a number of different technologies, processes, and methods. It is attached to many operations and has many applications related to engineering, planning, management, transport/logistics, insurance, telecommunications, and business.〔 For that reason, GIS and location intelligence applications can be the foundation for many location-enabled services that rely on analysis and visualization. GIS can relate unrelated information by using location as the key index variable. Locations or extents in the Earth space–time may be recorded as dates/times of occurrence, and x, y, and z coordinates representing, longitude, latitude, and elevation, respectively. All Earth-based spatial–temporal location and extent references should, ideally, be relatable to one another and ultimately to a "real" physical location or extent. This key characteristic of GIS has begun to open new avenues of scientific inquiry. ==History of development== The first known use of the term "geographic information system" was by Roger Tomlinson in the year 1968 in his paper "A Geographic Information System for Regional Planning".〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/fall12articles/the-fiftieth-anniversary-of-gis.html )〕 Tomlinson is also acknowledged as the "father of GIS".〔http://ucgis.org/ucgis-fellow/roger-tomlinson〕 Previously, one of the first applications of spatial analysis in epidemiology is the 1832 "''Rapport sur la marche et les effets du choléra dans Paris et le département de la Seine''".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Rapport sur la marche et les effets du choléra dans Paris et le département de la Seine. Année 1832 )〕 The French geographer Charles Picquet represented the 48 districts of the city of Paris by halftone color gradient according to the number of deaths by cholera per 1,000 inhabitants. In 1854 John Snow determined the source of a cholera outbreak in London by marking points on a map depicting where the cholera victims lived, and connecting the cluster that he found with a nearby water source. This was one of the earliest successful uses of a geographic methodology in epidemiology. While the basic elements of topography and theme existed previously in cartography, the John Snow map was unique, using cartographic methods not only to depict but also to analyze clusters of geographically dependent phenomena. The early 20th century saw the development of photozincography, which allowed maps to be split into layers, for example one layer for vegetation and another for water. This was particularly used for printing contours – drawing these was a labour-intensive task but having them on a separate layer meant they could be worked on without the other layers to confuse the draughtsman. This work was originally drawn on glass plates but later plastic film was introduced, with the advantages of being lighter, using less storage space and being less brittle, among others. When all the layers were finished, they were combined into one image using a large process camera. Once color printing came in, the layers idea was also used for creating separate printing plates for each color. While the use of layers much later became one of the main typical features of a contemporary GIS, the photographic process just described is not considered to be a GIS in itself – as the maps were just images with no database to link them to. Computer hardware development spurred by nuclear weapon research led to general-purpose computer "mapping" applications by the early 1960s. The year 1960 saw the development of the world's first true operational GIS in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada by the federal Department of Forestry and Rural Development. Developed by Dr. Roger Tomlinson, it was called the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) and was used to store, analyze, and manipulate data collected for the Canada Land Inventory – an effort to determine the land capability for rural Canada by mapping information about soils, agriculture, recreation, wildlife, waterfowl, forestry and land use at a scale of 1:50,000. A rating classification factor was also added to permit analysis. CGIS was an improvement over "computer mapping" applications as it provided capabilities for overlay, measurement, and digitizing/scanning. It supported a national coordinate system that spanned the continent, coded lines as arcs having a true embedded topology and it stored the attribute and locational information in separate files. As a result of this, Tomlinson has become known as the "father of GIS", particularly for his use of overlays in promoting the spatial analysis of convergent geographic data.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=GIS Hall of Fame – Roger Tomlinson )〕 CGIS lasted into the 1990s and built a large digital land resource database in Canada. It was developed as a mainframe-based system in support of federal and provincial resource planning and management. Its strength was continent-wide analysis of complex datasets. The CGIS was never available commercially. In 1964 Howard T. Fisher formed the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (LCGSA 1965–1991), where a number of important theoretical concepts in spatial data handling were developed, and which by the 1970s had distributed seminal software code and systems, such as SYMAP, GRID, and ODYSSEY – that served as sources for subsequent commercial development—to universities, research centers and corporations worldwide. By the late 1970s two public domain GIS systems (MOSS and GRASS GIS) were in development, and by the early 1980s, M&S Computing (later Intergraph) along with Bentley Systems Incorporated for the CAD platform, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), CARIS (Computer Aided Resource Information System), MapInfo Corporation and ERDAS (Earth Resource Data Analysis System) emerged as commercial vendors of GIS software, successfully incorporating many of the CGIS features, combining the first generation approach to separation of spatial and attribute information with a second generation approach to organizing attribute data into database structures.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Open Source GIS History – OSGeo Wiki Editors )〕 In 1986, Mapping Display and Analysis System (MIDAS), the first desktop GIS product emerged for the DOS operating system. This was renamed in 1990 to MapInfo for Windows when it was ported to the Microsoft Windows platform. This began the process of moving GIS from the research department into the business environment. By the end of the 20th century, the rapid growth in various systems had been consolidated and standardized on relatively few platforms and users were beginning to explore viewing GIS data over the Internet, requiring data format and transfer standards. More recently, a growing number of free, open-source GIS packages run on a range of operating systems and can be customized to perform specific tasks. Increasingly geospatial data and mapping applications are being made available via the world wide web.〔Fu, P., and J. Sun. 2010. ''Web GIS: Principles and Applications''. ESRI Press. Redlands, CA. ISBN 1-58948-245-X.〕 Several authoritative articles on the history of GIS have been published.〔Tim Foresman 1997 The History of GIS (Geographic Information Systems): Perspectives from the Pioneers. (Prentice Hall Series in Geographic Information Science) Prentice Hall PTR; 1st edition (November 10, 1997), 416 p.〕〔Coppock, J. T., and D. W. Rhind, (1991). The history of GIS. Geographical Information Systems: principles and applications. Ed. David J. Maguire, Michael F. Goodchild and David W. Rhind. Essex: Longman Scientific & Technical, 1991. 1: 21–43.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Geographic information system」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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