Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
decision making. Its first proponents and developers came from urban
research (Horwood), planning (McHarg), analysis (Fisher), and natural
resource management (Tomlinson). Edgar Horwood was interested in exam-
ining how urban areas developed and was one of the first individuals to offer
an academic course on the processing of GI. In 1963 he founded the Urban
and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA), which still exists
today. Ian McHarg, a landscape architect, became intrigued by the potential
for improving and democratizing planning studies and published his seminal
Design with Nature
in 1968. Howard Fisher had begun working around the
same time as Horwood and went to Harvard University in the mid-1960s to
develop general-purpose automated mapping and analysis software. Under
his direction, the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial
Analysis became one of the key locations for developing early GIS applica-
tions and approaches. In parallel, Roger Tomlinson, who was involved in
studies of land use in Canada during the late 1950s through an aerial survey
company, began working closely with IBM and developed a system for man-
aging land use information. In 1963 the team working on the project named
this the “Canadian Geographical Information System.”
Of course, many others were involved. Many other stories are crucial to
the myriad ways GIS developed and became such a vibrant and significant
technology. Certainly, the many interactions, formal and informal, that took
place during the 1950s and 1960s were crucial to the development of GIS as
we know it today. Jack Dangermond, a student of landscape architecture at
Harvard University, heard about work in Fisher's lab. Grasping the opportu-
nity, he founded a company in Redlands, California, that drew on lessons
from the Harvard lab and has since become one of the most successful GIS
software and consulting companies, the Environmental Systems Research
Institute, or ESRI.
GIS for many years was a domain dominated by large companies and
government agencies, especially agencies involved in mapping, such as the
U.S. Geological Service (USGS), but the rapid fall of prices for computing
hardware in the 1980s and 1990s led to many smaller government agencies
and private companies becoming very significant. ESRI has undoubtedly
been dominant in many areas; smaller companies that fill specific niches
have become increasingly prevalent in the late 1990s. A new group of
smaller companies that parallel the development and diversification that
accompanied the development of the Internet, has become increasingly sig-
nificant. The importance of standards and specifications indicates that GIS
has been changing and continues to change.
Where Is GIS Going?
Although the future will certainly see a continuation of GIS usage for pro-
jects involving geospatial distributions and existing application areas, new
directions are already evident that may alter the ways by which GIS develops.
Primarily, these new GIS futures are in embedded applications and spatial
Search WWH ::
Custom Search