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A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. Much of this often happens within a spatial database, however, this is not essential to meet the definition of a GIS. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system also to include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, the body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations.
Topography is the study of the forms and features of land surfaces. The topography of an area may refer to the land forms and features themselves, or a description or depiction in maps.
A coverage is the digital representation of some spatio-temporal phenomenon. ISO 19123 provides the definition:
Remote sensing is the acquisition of information about an object or phenomenon without making physical contact with the object, in contrast to in situ or on-site observation. The term is applied especially to acquiring information about Earth and other planets. Remote sensing is used in numerous fields, including geophysics, geography, land surveying and most Earth science disciplines ; it also has military, intelligence, commercial, economic, planning, and humanitarian applications, among others.
Ground truth is information that is known to be real or true, provided by direct observation and measurement as opposed to information provided by inference.
Image analysis or imagery analysis is the extraction of meaningful information from images; mainly from digital images by means of digital image processing techniques. Image analysis tasks can be as simple as reading bar coded tags or as sophisticated as identifying a person from their face.
A GIS file format is a standard for encoding geographical information into a computer file, as a specialized type of file format for use in geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial applications. Since the 1970s, dozens of formats have been created based on various data models for various purposes. They have been created by government mapping agencies, GIS software vendors, standards bodies such as the Open Geospatial Consortium, informal user communities, and even individual developers.
Geomatics is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as the "discipline concerned with the collection, distribution, storage, analysis, processing, presentation of geographic data or geographic information". Under another definition, it consists of products, services and tools involved in the collection, integration and management of geographic (geospatial) data. Surveying engineering was the widely used name for geomatic(s) engineering in the past. Geomatics was placed by the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems under the branch of technical geography.
Photogrammetry is the science and technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through the process of recording, measuring and interpreting photographic images and patterns of electromagnetic radiant imagery and other phenomena.
Geoinformatics is a scientific field primarily within the domains of Computer Science and technical geography. It focuses on the programming of applications, spatial data structures, and the analysis of objects and space-time phenomena related to the surface and underneath of Earth and other celestial bodies. The field develops software and web services to model and analyse spatial data, serving the needs of geosciences and related scientific and engineering disciplines. The term is often used interchangeably with Geomatics, although the two have distinct focuses; Geomatics emphasizes acquiring spatial knowledge and leveraging information systems, not their development. At least one publication has claimed the discipline is pure computer science outside the realm of geography.
TerraLib is an open-source geographic information system (GIS) software library. It extends object-relational database management systems (DBMS) to handle spatiotemporal data types.
A GIS software program is a computer program to support the use of a geographic information system, providing the ability to create, store, manage, query, analyze, and visualize geographic data, that is, data representing phenomena for which location is important. The GIS software industry encompasses a broad range of commercial and open-source products that provide some or all of these capabilities within various information technology architectures.
Simple Features is a set of standards that specify a common storage and access model of geographic features made of mostly two-dimensional geometries used by geographic databases and geographic information systems. It is formalized by both the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
A spatial database is a general-purpose database that has been enhanced to include spatial data that represents objects defined in a geometric space, along with tools for querying and analyzing such data.
ArcGIS Server is the core server geographic information system (GIS) software made by Esri. ArcGIS Server is used for creating and managing GIS Web services, applications, and data. ArcGIS Server is typically deployed on-premises within the organization’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) or off-premises in a cloud computing environment.
Integrated Land and Water Information System (ILWIS) is a geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing software for both vector and raster processing. Its features include digitizing, editing, analysis and display of data, and production of quality maps. ILWIS was initially developed and distributed by ITC Enschede in the Netherlands for use by its researchers and students. Since 1 July 2007, it has been released as free software under the terms of the GPL-2.0-only license. Having been used by many students, teachers and researchers for more than two decades, ILWIS is one of the most user-friendly integrated vector and raster software programmes currently available. ILWIS has some very powerful raster analysis modules, a high-precision and flexible vector and point digitizing module, a variety of very practical tools, as well as a great variety of user guides and training modules all available for downloading. The current version is ILWIS 3.8.6. Similar to the GRASS GIS in many respects, ILWIS is currently available natively only on Microsoft Windows. However, a Linux Wine manual has been released.
A remote sensing software is a software application that processes remote sensing data. Remote sensing applications are similar to graphics software, but they enable generating geographic information from satellite and airborne sensor data. Remote sensing applications read specialized file formats that contain sensor image data, georeferencing information, and sensor metadata. Some of the more popular remote sensing file formats include: GeoTIFF, NITF, JPEG 2000, ECW, MrSID, HDF, and NetCDF.
Gilberto Câmara is a Brazilian computer scientist and is currently serving as the Secretariat Director for the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). He is a former director of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE). He was head of INPE's Image Processing Division from 1991 to 1996 and Director for Earth Observation from 2001 to 2005.
A 3D city model is digital model of urban areas that represent terrain surfaces, sites, buildings, vegetation, infrastructure and landscape elements in three-dimensional scale as well as related objects belonging to urban areas. Their components are described and represented by corresponding two- and three-dimensional spatial data and geo-referenced data. 3D city models support presentation, exploration, analysis, and management tasks in a large number of different application domains. In particular, 3D city models allow "for visually integrating heterogeneous geoinformation within a single framework and, therefore, create and manage complex urban information spaces."
Remote sensing is used in the geological sciences as a data acquisition method complementary to field observation, because it allows mapping of geological characteristics of regions without physical contact with the areas being explored. About one-fourth of the Earth's total surface area is exposed land where information is ready to be extracted from detailed earth observation via remote sensing. Remote sensing is conducted via detection of electromagnetic radiation by sensors. The radiation can be naturally sourced, or produced by machines and reflected off of the Earth surface. The electromagnetic radiation acts as an information carrier for two main variables. First, the intensities of reflectance at different wavelengths are detected, and plotted on a spectral reflectance curve. This spectral fingerprint is governed by the physio-chemical properties of the surface of the target object and therefore helps mineral identification and hence geological mapping, for example by hyperspectral imaging. Second, the two-way travel time of radiation from and back to the sensor can calculate the distance in active remote sensing systems, for example, Interferometric synthetic-aperture radar. This helps geomorphological studies of ground motion, and thus can illuminate deformations associated with landslides, earthquakes, etc.
References
- ↑ Câmara, Gilberto; Souza, Ricardo Cartaxo Modesto; Freitas, Ubirajara Moura; Garrido, Juan (1996). "Spring: Integrating remote sensing and gis by object-oriented data modelling". Computers & Graphics. Elsevier BV. 20 (3): 395–403. doi:10.1016/0097-8493(96)00008-8. ISSN 0097-8493.
- ↑ "SPRING". DPI (in Portuguese). Retrieved 2023-09-19.