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and one of the most important was the introduction of the geographical data matrix by
Berry [3]. His representation of geographical data in matrix form with the rows
representing the spatial units and the columns their attributes rapidly became the de
facto standard for organizing GIS data. It was during this period that the first fully
functional GIS, the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS), was put into pro-
duction. This system, which was originally a collaboration between Roger Tomlinson's
company, Spartan Air Services of Ottawa, and the Canadian Government's, Canada
Land Inventory, pioneered a series of hardware and software innovations [41]. During
this time academia's contributions were largely due to the work undertaken at the Har-
vard Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis which had been founded in 1965
by Howard Fisher and produced computer mapping packages such as SYMAP and
SYMVU among others that were widely used throughout North American Universi-
ties. William Warntz followed Fisher as the Director of the Lab in 1969 and made
some truly innovative contributions concerning the critical features of three dimen-
sional surfaces that led to the use of triangulated irregular networks (TIN) models to
provide compact storage of surface features [39], [37].
Phase 2 was characterized by the improvement of many of the fundamental algo-
rithms of coordinate geometry (COGO) on which GIS software development de-
pended. These included point-in-polygon and polygon overlay routines as well as
shortest path and location-allocation algorithms, among others. By the end of this
period GIS software was beginning to move away from its mainframe roots and on to
minicomputers and, eventually, the newly introduced IBM microcomputers.
Phase 3, the commercial period, saw the increasing dominance of the major soft-
ware companies such as Intergraph, MapInfo, Caliper Corporation and Esri. Despite
the dominance of the major GIS companies, software packages were also developed
in University Labs. These packages included Yale University's Map GIS, Ohio
State's Map for the PC and, perhaps most significantly, for it is the lone survivor, the
Idrisi GIS software from Clark University. It was in this phase that a number of major
educational initiatives were launched. In the UK, in 1985, the government set up Lord
Chorley's Committee of Enquiry into the Handling of Geographic Information by
computer [29]. This subsequently led to the founding of a number of regional research
laboratories (RRLs) at universities throughout the UK. Soon after, the US National
Science Foundation held a competition for a National Center for Geographic Informa-
tion and Analysis (NCGIA). The winning bid came from a consortium of three uni-
versities: the lead was the Department of Geography at the University of California at
Santa Barbara, the two supporting institutions were the Department of Geography at
the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Department of Surveying at the
University of Maine at Orono.
Funding from the National Science Foundation is primarily for research and
the newly formed NCGIA at Santa Barbara immediately launched a number of re-
search Initiatives. Nevertheless, researchers at the NCGIA felt that most geography
departments throughout North America were severely understaffed in terms of GIS
expertise often only having one or two or perhaps no faculty members who were im-
mediately prepared to teach semester long courses in the subject. To help correct this
deficiency the NCGIA set out to develop a year long, three semester course in GIS
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