What is GIS?
Living in what we call ‘the age of information’ or even the ‘information society’, the availability of global networks, large data storage capacities, high resolution sensors and fast information transmission results in vast amounts of data and information that needs to be acquired, stored, organised and structured, filtered and transmitted. ‘Information systems’ are becoming increasingly important not only to manage data, but also for the interpretation of data and thus the extraction of information. In information systems, the term data is used for unprocessed, uninterpreted data. By interpreting data, meaningful information can be extracted. However, different - even contradicting - information can often be extracted from one data source, depending on factors like perspective, interest, additional data sources or even culture. Thus, an information system is a tool that should be able to store, transform, query, and finally present data in various ways. It is usually capable of integrating and combining data from different sources. By analyzing and interpreting this data, the data is transformed into useful information by a user.