What is Gis

Have you ever wondered about the components of the environment?

Those that can be seen and touched like trees, roads, rivers, buildings,people,
e.t.c and those that cannot be touched like temperature, rainfall, humidity ,  height, pressure e.t.c

The environment

Each of the above components has a unique location on the earth's surface 

which can be collected, stored, analysed and used to accomplish 
a given objective

Therefore, a geographic information system (GIS) is  designed to capture, store,
manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial data about these components
of the earth. One can define a GIS as:
A system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographical data.
A computer-based tool that analyzes, stores, manipulates and visualizes geographic information, usually in a map.
A computerized system that analyzes and displays geographically referenced information.

Coupled with geographical data is usually tabular data known as attribute data. 

which contains additional information about the features i.e data about data
if we look at the districts data of a given country, the actual location of the districts is the spatial data in coordinate format . Additional data such as the districts  name, population, number of health centers, number of schools 

e.t.c make up the attribute data. 

A combination of these two enables the use of GIS in solving problems  and 

making decisions .

Today the system is used in Many applications such as Map making, Accident

hotpots analysis ,Urban Planning,transportation Planning,Environmental Impact

Analysis, Disaster Management and Mitigation, Land Information System among many other applications.