Gis History

2.2.5 History of development in GIS
A GIS (geographic or geospatial information system) is a modern extension of traditional cartography with one fundamental similarity and two essential differences. The similarity lies in the fact that both a cartographic document and a GIS contain examples of a base map to which additional data can be added. The differences are that there is no limit to the amount of additional data that can be added to a GIS map and secondly the GIS uses analysis and statistics to present data in support of particular arguments which a cartographic map cannot do. Cartographic maps are often extremely simplified as there are limits to the amount of data that can be physically and meaningfully stored on a small map.
There

A printing technique known as photzincography was used to separate out layer from a map. Vegetation, Water and developed land could all be printed as separate themes. Whilst giving the appearance of being a GIS this does not represent a full GIS as there is no opportunity to provide an analysis of the mapped data.
By the 1960s the nuclear arms program had given rise to hardware and mapping applications and the first operational GIS had been launched in Ottawa, Canada and used to store collate and analyse data about land usage in Canada. The system was enhanced throughout the seventies and eighties until the mid-nineties by which time it was driven by mainframe hardware and contained data sets from the entire Canadian land mass.
During the seventies and eighties developments in spatial awareness and how to handle spatial data were being made in key academic centres such as Harvard and ESRI. In the 1990s, one of the largest GIS suppliers released ArcView which was a desktop solution for producing mapping systems via a Windows based interface. The ArcView standard was soon adopted by many government, business, defence and non-governmental organisations and has become the defacto industry

At the same time the spread of the internet provided a means by which to access an utilise standard maps as suppliers such as ESRI encouraged organisations to add data sets to the map sets they were already making available across the Internet. Key sectors such as government, non-government bodies and utilities seem to be developing an approach to sharing data and there is evidence of significant sharing across such platforms as ere has been significant sharing of data sets across shared platforms such as the Ersi offering. Currently the industry is debating how best to resolve issues arising from data ownership on public platforms. Significantly commercial organisations appear to be reluctant to join the growing trend of bodies prepared to share their data but this is down to the commercial advantage tht such data can