Lesson Note On History of GIS

History of GIS

There is some debate over when true GIS really started, thanks to the disparate technologies that came together to give us GIS as we understand it today (1), but effectively it has been around since the early 1960s. Advocates claim that it was truly born in 1962 with the first CLI conference (Canadian Land Inventory) that set out to produce masses of data of maps of Canada covering a large number of potential uses and data sets (2). The conference produced these maps using the old methods but it was first theorised here that in future, such data could be produced using the developing computing technology as data got bigger and potential to explore it became more and more complex (8).

The next few decades saw the technology strictly limited to those who had the resources: the hardware and the software were both expenses that had to be justified for the business or the industry, hence that fossil fuel companies represent some of the earliest groups to take up the technology. The 1980s when home computing was increasingly the norm and IT technology began to spread its wings, the business ESRI was formed. Today they are famous for the popular package ARCGIS; the second most popular package in the world today is MapInfo and the corporation was also formed in the same decade (10). But it would be some time before their software - as popular and as useful as it was - would be anything more than a niche interest.

GIS would not begin to grow until the birth of the internet; even when uptake was relatively slow, those for whom the internet was proving a useful business tool finally saw the potential for the affordability of GIS (3: 22). Historians of technology believe that the increasing portable nature of the internet of the last ten years has really aided GIS technology to experience its growth in the same period (3: 23). Why? Because data collection and transmission became so much easier as well as less costly than it had been before. Suddenly, GIS was no longer just available to the big companies who could afford to invest in the technology to gather and manipulate it, but to everyone. Charities could collect data relatively cheaply, as could conservation organisations and land authorities, town councils and urban planners. None of these groups need rely on older and slower methods of data collection when they could do so far more cheaply. Now, non-profits and even the general public had access to the same data previously only afforded to private industry and governments (5). A great example of this is the UK Environment Agency website that has collated data from a number of government agencies and NGOs and made it freely available for public use (6).

Today, most organisations that collect and use data make information available to almost anyone. Though confidential data may require that the user register on a site and sign a non-disclosure agreement, the nature of Big Data coupled with the exponential growth of Web 2.0 and how that data is used means that anyone can produce useful maps (3: 24-25). In the early days, GIS was concerned with how the world looks but less concerned with how it works. This is a result of the growth of technology, decreasing price of the technology and the fact that we can do more things with more data (3: 44-45).