Applications of Gis

In practice, a Geographical information system abbreviated as ”GIS” is used in diverse applications in day to day life. its applications stem from day to day life to complex scientific and mathematical uses. In reality these applications cannot be exhausted and thus this post will only discuss a few of the applications.

Land Management

It involves storage and management of records about ownership and transfer of parcels of land. A Land management system is also at times referred to as land information system or Cadaster. The capability of a “GIS” to store and visualize spatial data ( coordinates of plots) together with its attribute data (details of owners) enables this application in land management institutions both Govt and non NGO’s

Urban and Physical planning

Urban planning is a technical and political process concerned with the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks. In drafting, and laying out of the features of the built environment GIS is always used

Land Surveying

In simple terms, land surveying can be defined as determination of the position of features on the earth’s surface both natural and man made. in their work, surveyors deal with collection, analysis , management and display of geographical data and thus the employment of a ”GIS”

Disaster Management 

A disaster is a sudden accident or a natural catastrophe that causes great damage or loss of life e.g floods, landslides e.t.c . Disaster Management makes us aware of the possible natural calamities and when they are likely to happen. This enables proper planning of resources and effort for action. ”GIS” together with other fields such as remote sensing are used in analysis of different ”GIS” layers and processed earth observations to map vulnerability of a given society to disasters.

Navigation

When it comes to navigation, ”GIS” ranges from simple everyday day applications to diverse and advanced navigation solutions.

Today every smart phone has the capability to use google maps. Google Maps is a web mapping service developed by Google with which offers routing solutions for pedestrians, cars, bicycles e.t.c . Advanced digital navigation solutions based on GIS have been developed for business, tourists vehicles, army vehicles, racing cars, and airplanes e.g Uber cars and Safe Boda

Hot Spot analysis

Hot spot analysis is a spatial analysis and mapping technique that is focused on the identification of clustering of spatial phenomena. This may be applied in analysis of a given disease,crime rate, accidents e.t.c.

Suitability analysis

This field deals in the investigation of the best region for the establishment of a particular entity . In farming, it is always used to predict the performance and best region to grow a new crop basing on specific factors that affect the growth of a given crop

The above is done using a multi criteria Decision system, where different components are ranked and weighted according to their contribution to the growth of the crops.

Environmental Management

one of the ways in which ” GIS” is used is through analysis of land covers changes. using a given base year land cover maps for different selected time periods are analysed to determine the rate at which the green environment is converted into urban features. through further analysis using satellite imagery, pollution levels can also be quantified in a given area.

Mapping

This was basically the traditional role of a ”GIS”. Cartographers always use GIS software to draft national, regional, tourist maps e.t.c this is because the ”GIS” software have an numerous built visualization and mapping functions.