GEO 465/565 - Distance Ed. Lecture 3
History of GIS
plus...
Very anecdotal
"One of the most striking features of early GIS developments, especially in
the 1960s, was the way in which initiatives were occurring independently in
many places, often without reference to, and even in ignorance of, related
work." -- Terry Coppock
Important developments in GIS were influenced by key groups, companies, and individuals
North American contributions
persuasive power of individual pioneers
huge size of the internal GIS market
leading role of the U.S. in developing hardware & software
large user appreciation of need for speedy, cost-effective handling of data
Idea of portraying different layers of data on a series of base maps and relating things geographically is NOT NEW!
18th century maps of the Battle of Yorktown drawn by French cartographer
Louis-Alexandre Berthier contained hinged overlays to show troop
movements
1850s Atlas to Accompany the Second Report of the Irish Railway Commissioners
population, traffic flow, geology and topography superimposed on same base map
Advances in computer technology
Advent of electronic computers in 1950s, digitizers, plotters, graphics terminals in 1960s
Simultaneous, often unrelated development of advanced software
routines for displaying & plotting graphs
algorithms & techniques to facilitate spatial analysis
database management software
Great deal of THEORETICAL work on spatial relationships and geography
Quantitative Revolution in Geography
- William Garrison at UW
- Torsten Hagerstrand in Sweden
- Harold McCarty at Iowa
- all among 1st to develop quantitative methods for geographical analysis
1- Pioneer Period - McHarg
Manual map overlay as a method was first describe comprehensively
by Jacqueline Tyrwhitt in a 1950 planning textbook.
Ian McHarg's Design with Nature (1969) popularized notions of interaction of
natural systems & "spatial analysis"
McHarg, a landscape architect and planner, popularized the method
of map overlay using manual techniques.
Graphic - McHarg used blacked-out transparent overlays for site
selection in Design with Nature
Started in the 1960s, CGIS is an example of one of the earliest successful GISs
A large-scale system still operating today
Development provided many conceptual & technical contributions
Roger Tomlinson, the father of GIS, now w/ Tomlinson Assoc., Ottawa
Purpose: to analyze data collected by Canada Land Inventory
(CLI) & to produce statistics to be used in developing land management
plans for large rural areas
CLI needed to classify land using:
soil capability for agriculture
recreation capability
capability for wildlife (hoofed critters or waterfowl)
forestry capability
shorelines
present land use
The fabulous 1960s: perception was that computers could perform analyses once data had been input!!
CGIS required development of new technology
no previous experience in how to structure data internally
no precedent for GIS operations of overlay, area measurement
experimental scanner had to be built for map input
use of SCANNING for input partitioning of data into themes or layers
concept of an attribute table
separation of data into location and attribute files functions for polygon overlay, area measurement
many others
Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics & Spatial Analysis
Howard Fisher moved from Chicago to establish this lab for development of general-purpose mapping software in mid 1960s
Major influence on development of GIS until early 1980s
Still continues at a smaller scale
Many pioneers of next-generation GIS were original members of the Harvard Lab including:
OSUs own DENIS WHITE
Harvard software was widely distributed & helped build the application
base for GIS
Software had dramatic effects on the way people made maps or thought about
automated mapping
Visions of a better world where automated mapping could provide framework for
spatial analysis
SYMAP (general purpose mapping)
CALFORM (plotter output)
SYMVU (perspective views)
ODYSSEY (forerunner of ARC/INFO)
Government-funded research developed into a major enterprise
Role of individuals was diminished somewhat on the national scene except for strong-minded heads of national mapping agencies
Effect of individuals strongly persisted at the local level
Need for a method of assigning census returns to correct geographical locations
how to convert a street ADDRESS to a geographic coordinate so that data could be organized into reporting zones & maps
Need for a comprehensive approach to census geography
1970 became the first geocoded census
DIME (Dual Independent Map Encoding) files were developed
coded street segments between intersections into x,y coordinates
borrowed algorithms from the CGIS and from the Harvard Labs
POLYVRT data conversion program
First popular use of topology in geographic information mgmt.
mathematical way of explicitly defining spatial relationships
DIME files stimulated developmental work on products that rely on street network databases
auto navigation systems
garbage truck routing
emergency vehicle dispatching
Urban atlases produced with the 1970 geocoded census
value of simple computer maps for marketing, retailing applications
Systems handling individual data sets on isolated machines giving way to those
dealing with corporate and distributed databases
accessed across networks
increasingly integrated into other, NON-SPATIAL databases within a company
Activities now becoming routine without need for skilled fixers
In 1969 Jack Dangermond founded the Environmental Systems
Research Institute based on techniques & ideas being developed at the
Harvard Lab & elsewhere
ARC/INFO was released in the early 1980s
ARC/INFO was/is a VERY successful implemention of CGIS idea of separate locational and attribute information
successful marriage of a standard relational database management system
(INFO) to handle attribute tables, with specialized software to handle objects
stored as arcs (ARC)
1st GIS to take advantage of new super-mini hardware
availability on multiple platforms & operating systems
initial success in forestry, now diversified
expansion to $40 million company by 1988, $200 million by 1996
Founded in 1969 as M&S Computing by Jim Meadlock, a former IBM
employee
Real-time guidance of missiles
1st stand-alone graphics system in 1973 @ $100,000
1st to develop an interactive automated mapping for a local govt. in 1973
leader in GIS hardware, as well as software, & user-interfaces
strong competition among commercial vendors giving way to user dominance
even more activities becoming routine
user can install, use, and in some cases even modify software
proliferation and improvement of documentation, as well as user groups and electronic mailing lists
U.S. Army developed GRASS for Army environmental planners & land managers
the entire GIS is public-domain
source code for GRASS is non-proprietary
USERS as well as programmers can create application and demonstration models, and/or link GRASS with other software packages
Version 4.1, released in 1993, includes source code, reference, tutorial, & programmer documentation, as well as data
Army Corps of Engineers under pressure from military higher-ups NOT to compete with the private sector
Support for GRASS was therefore turned over to a university (first Rutgers, now Baylor)
Because software is public-domain, the source code, although powerful &
tailor-made for so many applications, is often poorly-developed and
organized
Internet History Section
(special thanks to Carl Reed of Intergraph and Bill Thoen of
GEOWorld)
Question:
Besides ESRI & Intergraph, 1999 was the 30th
anniversary of what technology?
the Internet, of course!
We Forget How Young the Internet Is!
1971 - Ray Tomlinson invents email.
- There were only 23 machines on the Internet!
1985 AOL founded.
1988 - Ezra Zubrow creates GIS-L
1990 - The phrase "World Wide Web" coined
- The idea for Java is born.
1991 - Dan Connolly develops specification for
HTML.
- "E-commerce" is born
1992 - over 1 million computers on Internet
- GIS-L "gatewayed" to comp.infosystems.gis
1993 - Marc Andreessen develops the first widely
available graphics mode browser - MOSIAC.
- There are 53 web servers on the Internet
- Service traffic increases by 341,634%!
1994 - WWW Consortium formed
1994 - New listservs, including ESRI-L, IDRISI-L, MapInfo-L
- First maps on the Web using GIS
1994 - National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)
- Low cost, high-quality, integrated data
- Open access creates more "wealth"
1994 - Open GIS Consortium (OGC)
1995 - Java officially released
1995 - Netscape formed - watch out Bill!
1999 - OGC Web Mapping Test bed
- It is now estimated that over 40,000,000 map images are
shipped on the Web each day!
Will geospatial technology become part of Information Technology (IT)? YES!
BACK TO TOP
Need an additional lecture to cover the U.K. experience
Developments elsewhere associated primarily with national mapping agencies
and the maintenance of land property records
SWEDISH Land Databank System (1970s)
Australia Resources Information System (1970s)
http://dusk.geo.orst.edu/gis/lec03.html
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