Mobile Geographic Information Systems

From Conventional Geographic Information Systems (Gis) To Mobile Gis

In mid-1960s, with the prospect of handling and analysing spatial data digitally, the beginning of geographic information systems (GIS) had been explored in both professional and academic areas, as shown in the time line in Figure 1. In Canada, a prototype of GIS was started for the Canada Land Inventory which aimed to map existing land uses and analyse land capability for forestry, agriculture, wildlife and recreation (Tomlinson, 1984). The output of this early stage of GIS was regarded the cost-effective way for mapping the whole land area of Canada at the time. This system became fully operational in 1971. In 1964, in the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA, the first digital mapping software, named SYMAP, was created in 1964. SYMAP used line printers to produce primitive maps to visualise landscape themes of human and physical phenomena for identifying spatial similarities and groupings (McHaffie, 2000). These maps were represented as coarse lines of equally spaced characters and symbols. Evolving from SYMAP, the GRID package with command-line user interface and ODYSSEY as a line-based (vector) prototype were developed as GIS software in the Laboratory in 1970s. Also in mid-1960s, the US Bureau of Census aimed to produce digital maps of street blocks and census tracts for supporting 1971 census. This introduced explicit topology into the data structure. These early developments set the foundation of GIS, such as raster (grid) and vector (line) data structures, the use of database management for spatial data, the use of data layers (treating each theme as a layer of data), and the use of topology in handling objects and their spatial relationships (topological relationships of points, lines and polygons).