Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
entire GIS industry had revenues in 2006, according to Daratech, of $3.6 bil-
lion worldwide. Although government spending is only part of the spending
on GIS, and although comparing spending to revenue is a crude measure, a
comparison of the GIS revenue and U.S. total government spending suggests
that GIS makes up only a tiny percent of all U.S. government spending. GIS
is important, but most government dollars are going toward other informa-
tion technologies. This becomes clear whenever a disaster strikes and the
responding agencies are unable to coordinate their GIS because of conflict-
ing standards and organizational responsibilities.
Even how government spending will change is a question for fortune-
tellers. Too many variables influence how government resources are spent.
The above considerations also leave out the important roles of the GIS in-
dustry and the private sector. Instead of attempting to prophesize develop-
ments, the sections in this chapter focus on some of the questions underly-
ing developments of GI and cartography in the next few years:
Where has GIS been?
•
Where is GIS going?
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What are the ethical issues?
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Who pays for the data?
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What are the opportunities?
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What is the employment outlook?
•
Where Has GIS Been?
Any history of GIS is a partial history. The technologies, institutions, and,
most of all, the people are still under examination. We lack information
about a number of key details. A number of authors (see the Chapter Read-
ings) have offered various studies and stories about how GIS developed.
Clearly, the deepest roots of what we call “GIS” today are complex and web-
like. They reach back into developments before and especially during World
War II of the first information technologies and computing technologies;
they fit into a scientific penchant among government institutions to develop
rational approaches to decision making and political desires to have empiri-
cal approaches to decision making, approaches that meld the strengths of
information technology with vast repositories of statistical information that
governments had begun to collect in the 19th century; they promote a scien-
tific engagement with technologies that provide more robust modes of deal-
ing with information; and they draw on geographers' and cartographers'
work attempting to develop visualization techniques that were f lexible
enough to meet the needs of governments and private industries and readily
taught at various levels to the technicians, analysts, and instructors needed to
support these needs.
If we need a creation story, GIS starts out in the desire to harness infor-
mation technology to a multitude of needs for representing geographic
things and events, primarily with an emphasis on supporting government
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