GIS

The book I read to research this post was GIS for Dummies by Michael N DeMers which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. GIS stands for geographic information system & is a form of software that represents various data in map form. GIS can be used by the emergency services, the military or by practically any kind of company although many individuals also use it. Almost anything that exists has a map somewhere that details its distribution. The software used in the examples in this book is mostly ArcGIS by ESRI & I looked on their website to see how much it is. The personal edition is $100 but also I noticed they have a cloud or online version which also gives you 2 GB of storage & is free for individuals to use. I haven't signed up yet but I'm going to because I think that's good value. The current version of ArcGIS is version 10. GIS software can show cancer hotspots, distribution of different types of buildings or population distribution to name just a few things. It isn't just about GPS which is just one component there are also things like soil sensors, & drum scanners which can read whole maps as well as output devices like printers & plotters, which can plot large portions of a map. GIS software can also show the distance between 2 points & the shortest route. It can display images in either raster type which means it is made up of tiny dots or it can use vector type which means a solid line is calculated mathematically. Rasterized images load up quicker. In addition you can often view things in 3d which is good for taking elevations into account.