Since the mid-80s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have found an enormous spread in business as well as administration and are ubiquitous also for anyone in the recent past. The handling and the use of maps, hiking maps, road maps or atlases are familiar to anyone. Spatial questions, which had previously been processed with maps and card indexes are now handled using GIS. Today geospatial information is omnipresent and affects everyone’s daily life, i.e. digital, computer-processable versions of maps, used on the smartphone in the form of an interactive town plan or in cars embedded in navigation systems, enabling the driver to find the shortest path from his location to a given target point. Geographic information systems provide a technology that allows the user to process spatial information and to apply it in a variety of application disciplines.
This chapter introduces GIS in a classic way with some terminology and a short consideration of the historical development. Next, the information processing chain from data acquisition to data management, data analysis and data presentation (IMAP) are described followed by important application domains. The varieties of GIS products which are available in the market are presented in their interrelation with respect to data acquisition, maintenance and dissemination. GIS follow common information systems architectures and represent themselves as distributed systems. Spatial data infrastructures provide interoperable geospatial information and are increasingly available also for mobile devices.
At the end of the contribution selected topical developments in the field of GIS are sketched, e.g. open government data or user generated content by citizens. Interesting developments are also reflected in 3D building and city models, which form in turn the basis for new indoor location services.