Geographic Information System

A Geographic Information System is a database that relates any kind of information to places. Census and meteorological data are natural sorts of information to store in a GIS. With the right set of data, GIS can be an incredibly powerful tool for any kind of planning, from your daily routine to large-scale corporate or government projects. Like most powerful tools, it has tremendous promise in the right hands and terribly sinister implications in the wrong ones.

Examples of the sorts of questions GIS has answered in practice:

• What's the fastest (or shortest, or safest) route from here to there?
• Where can we put a new fire station so that it will serve as many more citizens as possible?
• Where is a good place to put a stand of trees for noise and pollution abatement?
• How fast has this beach eroded over the past decade?
• Which of a set of billboards would appeal best to the people driving on this stretch of highway?
• How likely is a person living on such and such a street to default on their mortgage?
• How should we gerrymander the Congressional districts in our state so that our party will win the largest number of seats in the next election?
• When rounding up members of an undesirable ethnic group for imprisonment and/or slaughter, which neighborhoods should we raid wholesale and which should we avoid altogether?