GIS Today
"The early days of GIS were very lonely. No one knew what it meant" - Roger Tomlison, Father of GIS
GISDay, celebrated yesterday, and a part of the Geo Awareness Week, is a day where people from all walks of life come together around the world in many events, live or virtual, to educate, train, and understand what Geographic Information Systems (aka GIS) are and how they can be used in our daily lives; whether it is helping us navigate through horrendous traffic in a large city, visually understanding the devastating effects of a hurricane in its wake as it makes landfall, or clearly defining the position of a specialized clinic such that the patients in most need of its services, do not travel long distances.
GIS applications generally contain a processing component, a data component, and a visual component. These components allow for the storage, transformation, analysis, and visualization of data, either historical or in real-time, to solve personal or business challenges such as, and not limited to, (1) the reduction of transportation costs, by minimizing the distance and maximizing the resource utilization, (2) the distance customers need to travel from their house to a certain specialized store or service, (3) the sales distribution by zip code, where it can be clearly seen where gaps may exist in the sales by geography or where the sales have increased respectively, (4) the ability to determine what potential customers who reside in the same block of an existing company customer, look like in conjunction with sales data, or (5) Geo Fencing applied by delivering a personalized notification when a person's location is within a certain distance from a point of interest.
Today, GIS has come a long way; we invite you to join us in the GIS journey by participating in GIS Day events. Today, at 12 pm CST, I will host a virtual round table event where experts from Pitney Bowes and IDS will share with us their experience and knowledge in GIS systems, including their interaction with Business Intelligence and related Data sets to Geoenrich enterprise databases. To register click here.
Enjoy the rest of Geo Awareness Week 2017!
You can reach me at @ruizfranjavier