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Development
of GIS
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1. 35,000 years
ago, on the walls of caves near Lascaux, France,
Cro-Magnon hunters drew pictures of the animals they
hunted. Associated with the animal drawings are track
lines and tallies thought to depict migration routes.
While simplistic in comparison to modern technologies,
these early records mimic the two-element structure of
modern geographic information systems, an image
associated with attribute information.
2. Possibly
the earliest use of the geographic method, in 1854
John Snow depicted a cholera outbreak in London
using points to represent the locations of
individual cases. His study of the distribution of
cholera led to the source of the disease, a
contaminated water pump within the heart of the
outbreak.
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Original map by Dr. John Snow showing the clusters of
cholera cases in the London epidemic of 1854
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3. The early
20th century saw the development of "photo lithography"
where maps were separated into layers. Computer hardware
development spurred by nuclear weapon research would
lead to general purpose computer "mapping" applications
by the early 1960s. The year 1964 saw the development of
the world's first true operational GIS in Ottawa,
Ontario by the federal Department of Energy, Mines, and
Resources. Developed by Roger Tomlinson, it was called
"Canadian Geographic Information Systems" (CGIS) and was
used to store, analyse, and manipulate data collected
for the Canada Land Inventory (CLI)—an initiative to
determine the land capability for rural Canada by
mapping information about soils, agriculture,
recreation, wildlife, waterfowl, forestry, and land use
at a scale of 1:250,000. A rating classification factor
was also added to permit analysis.
CGIS was the
world's first "system" and was an improvement over
"mapping" applications as it provided capabilities for
overlay, measurement, and digitizing/scanning. It
supported a national coordinate system that spanned the
continent, coded lines as "arcs" having a true embedded
topology, and it stored the attribute and locational
information in separate files. As a result of this,
Tomlinson has become known as the "father of GIS."
4. CGIS
lasted into the 1990s and built the largest
digital land resource database in Canada. It was
developed as a mainframe based system in support
of federal and provincial resource planning and
management. Its strength was continent-wide
analysis of complex data sets. The CGIS was
never available in a commercial form. Its
initial development and success stimulated
various commercial mapping applications being
sold by vendors such as ESRI, MapInfo,
Intergraph etc to successfully incorporate many
of the CGIS features, combining the first
generation approach to separation of spatial and
attribute information with a second generation
approach to organizing attribute data into
database structures. The 1980s and 1990s
industry growth were spurred on by the growing
use of GIS on Unix workstations and the personal
computer. By the end of the 20th century, the
rapid growth in various systems had been
consolidated and standardized on relatively few
platforms and users were beginning to export the
concept of viewing GIS data over the Internet,
requiring data format and transfer standards.
More recently, there is a growing flavor of
free, open source GIS packages such as GRASS GIS
and Quantum GIS which run on a range of
operating systems and can be customised to
perform specific tasks.
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