Publication Date

Spring 2001

Degree Type

Master's Project

Degree Name

Master of Urban Planning (MUP)

Department

Urban and Regional Planning

Abstract

A critical element of competitive, market driven, companies are their Research and Development departments. As the client’s needs change, and as new technologies develop, R&D must adapt and use new technologies to stay competitive and to best meet the needs of their clients. Although government agencies are not in competition, per se. they should also stay abreast of, and make use of, new technological advances that can improve the way they do business. “The bottom line that any organization seeks through the development and adoption of a new system or other innovation is some measure of improvement, either in productivity, efficiency, or environmental effectiveness. Geographical Information Systems (GIS), as we know them, are well-over ten years old, and still agencies do not fully embrace the technology. GIS is slowly becoming more widely used and necessary to government agencies every year, and it has the potential to improve an agency’s or a region’s productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

For many, GIS is an unfamiliar tool with extensive unknowns. Simply put, GIS is a map with associated data tied to it, or a smart map. It is a computer-aided mapping system used to store, view, query, and analyze geographic or spatial data. In other words, a GIS is both a database system with specific capabilities for spatially-referenced data, as well »2 as a set of operations for working with the data. GIS is capable of organizing and displaying dozens, even hundreds, of geographic files and associated data files. A researcher can use GIS, an analytical tool, to query one or multiple datasets based on user-defined criteria or based upon another dataset and display its results. Several limitations of GIS exist but each is addressable.

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