What is Geospatial Information Systems (GISs)

Organizations and teams are becoming increasingly more distributed as groups work to expand their global presence while rationalizing team members across skill sets and areas of expertise instead of geographies. With this expansion comes the need for a robust and comprehensive language for pinpointing locations of globally distributed information systems and knowledge workers. Geospatial information systems (GISs) provide a common framework for jointly visualizing the world. This shared understanding of the world provides a powerful mechanism for collaborative dialogue in describing an environment, its assets, and procedures. The collaborative framework that GIS provides can help facilitate productive dialogue while constraining impulses of extreme positions. Collaboration and GIS intersections take many forms. Under a collaborative work-flow model, individuals use GIS to perform their job and post data back to the central database (e.g., engineering designs and as-built construction). This article addresses the increasing role of GIS in emerging architectures and information systems in a number of applications (e.g., land planning, military command and control, homeland security, utility-facilities management, etc.). Real-time applications, mobile access to data, GPS (global positioning satellite) tracking of assets, and other recent developments all play a role in extending the scope and utility of the GIS-enabled enterprise. The impact of new GIS Web services standards and open geospatial-data archives are also addressed as areas of increased potential for remote GIS collaboration in global organizations. The expansion of enterprise GIS within organizations increases the opportunity and necessity of using GIS collaboratively to improve business processes and efficiency, make better decisions, respond more quickly to customers and events, and so forth.