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Geographic Information Systems ( Gis )

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Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has had one of the biggest impacts on the discipline of modern day geography. Roger Tomlinson coined the term GIS in the early 1960s in Canada. Tomlinson defined GIS in its early days as a computer application designed to perform certain specific functions (Coppock et al; 1991). GIS is interdisciplinary in nature, having a distinctive role in geography. The application created for the Canada GIS department was designed to summarize and tabulate land inventory for the country; it solved two issues: to measure irregular homogeneous geographic areas and to overlay different themes. Other early systems were created for the Chicago Area Transportation Study, the U.S. Census Bureau and Landscape …show more content…

From this perspective, GIS on its own is meaningless; it gains meaning only by its goals, which generally involve the application of knowledge by scientists, but not science itself (Table 1; McCauley 1993; Moll 1993; Skelly 1993b). Discussants view it the same as remote sensing, it is a tool. Some scientist would argue that GIS is a part of the engineering field more than it is in the science field. Engineering is identified as a problem-solving activity and science is linked to discovery and problem solving understandings. It is also felt that GIS is a tool used by geographers to answer geographic questions, thus a tool only applied when going about the business of geography, so it is geography.
Other theorists believe that the tool is inseparable from the science. When GIS advances, so does the study of Geography and Cartography. Geographers are GIS toolmakers. They understand the concepts, methods, models and theories that are behind the tool. They also understand how a phenomenon is dispersed shown through the tool and knowledge of geographic concepts. This leads to the thought that if you can do GIS, then you do geography so therefore if one is a science the other must be a science as well.
The science debate over GIS is that it is a method and or a body of knowledge used to develop and test spatial theories and hypothesis. Many believe that it is not

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