(With due deference to United States Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson) When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one GIS user group to dissolve the licensing agreements which have connected them with a proprietary software vendor and to assume among the free and open source GIS users of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the capabilities of Geospatial Software...

While community-based organizations (CBOs) increasingly seek to utilize geographic information systems (GISs) for neighborhood planning and development, many have serious misconceptions about what GIS can and cannot do and what is needed to make effective use of it. This article describes the problems and opportunities in utilizing GIS as a tool for enhancing participatory planning in three nei...

Recently, Web-based GIS applications have become important tools for disseminating geographical information in digital map format on the Internet because of their platform independence, interactivity, and wide accessibility. This trend brings about new insights on the integration of Web-based GIS and multimedia on the Internet since multimedia has already been seen as the strength of Internet a...

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are becoming more prevalent for retailers in their use for both day-to-day and strategic decision-making. Given the array of internal and external databases they use, as well as the amount of organisational development, system implementation is a most apposite description of how a GIS supports retailing decision-making. System implementation has been one o...

This tutorial provides a foundation in GIS including its basic structure, concepts, and spatial analysis. GIS is a new field in business schools and presents opportunities for research. It is derived from about a dozen disciplines, some unfamiliar to most IS researchers. Following an overview of vertical-sector uses of GIS, the paper introduces their costs and benefits. The links of GIS to rela...

Geographic information systems (GIS) are computer-based tools for geographic data analysis and spatial visualization. They have become one of the information and communications technologies for education at all levels. This article reviews the current status of GIS in schools, analyzes the requirements of a GIS-based learning environment from constructivist perspectives, and discusses the major...

This chapter presents a programming-by-demonstration (PBD) approach to Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The aim of our approach is to enable non-specialist users to avail themselves of the software without having to resort to the help of expert users. We begin with a story of one group of non-specialist users who encountered difficulty with GIS software. Next we summarize findings of a s...

Introduction Geographic information systems (GIS) are not exactly new to the social sciences—the UK's Economic and Social Research Council funded a network of GIS-based laboratories at UK universities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the U.S. National Science Foundation's Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences funded the National Center for Geographic Information and An...

Computerized mapping provides a powerful way to present and identify many types of spatial relationships. This type of data presentation and visualization is possible through software called geographic information systems (GIS). GIS is viewed as one of the most important developments in computer technology since the advent of the computer spreadsheet (Raymond, 1997). The application of GIS tech...

This paper focuses on the use of geographic information system (GIS) in gender research and argues for the possibility that the tool has inherent biases with regard to data collection and representation. Introduction Given the mandate by large agencies to address gender in all development projects and the „Mainstreaming of Gender‟ at the World Bank, we can expect that new opportunities will eme...