What Is GIS? Capabilities and Use Cases

Introduction

Location data is used more and more in daily life and business. A geographic information system (GIS) lets you manage and use that location data efficiently. GIS is a useful tool in everyday life and in many fields, including urban planning, disaster prevention, and environmental conservation.

This article explains what GIS is and introduces examples of how it is used.

What is GIS?

GIS stands for Geographic Information System. In Japanese, it is called 地理情報システム.

The real world we live in is full of information based on location.

For example, picture the town where you live. You probably see many kinds of “things” there: street trees, streetlights, rivers, roads, buildings, and parks.

Beyond what you can see, there are also “phenomena” tied to a location, such as the temperature at a given point, prefectural boundaries, the population distribution of an area, and the locations of traffic accidents.

These things and phenomena related to places and areas are called “geographic information” (or “geospatial information”), and a system that handles them on a computer is called a geographic information system (GIS).

What GIS can do

Visualizing information

GIS can visualize data based on the coordinates (such as latitude and longitude) attached to these things and phenomena. By overlaying different kinds of data, you can see how the data relate to each other in space, which helps you understand a situation and make decisions.

Managing information

Take a restaurant as an example. Besides information about its location, such as its address and latitude and longitude, it has many other details: the type of cuisine (Japanese or Western), the seating capacity, and whether it has a smoking area. A river has information such as its name, width, water volume, and drainage basin area. A park has its site area, the types of playground equipment, and whether it has restrooms. Each thing or phenomenon carries its own kinds of information.

In GIS, you can attach this kind of information to the location of a thing or phenomenon.

Of course, when one shop is replaced by another, the information for that location changes. In GIS, you can manage a location and its information by rewriting the attributes you work with or adding new ones.

Data analysis

GIS can run many kinds of spatial analysis based on the attributes and positional relationships of data. For example, you can easily extract the restaurants within a 500 m radius of a station, measure the distance between two points, or calculate the area of a specified region.

In short, a key strength of GIS is that it can visualize and manage information and perform spatial analysis using that information.

GIS use cases

GIS is used in many fields. Here are a few examples by field.

For more detail, see the use case pages, which explain examples field by field.

Transportation and urban planning

When planning the development of transportation networks and other infrastructure, you can manage information such as land ownership, land use, and land prices, and overlay it with population density, traffic volume, and more to visualize and analyze it. This makes it possible to create effective urban plans and designs.

Disaster prevention

GIS overlays terrain data with disaster information, such as the areas expected to be inundated by floods and tsunamis. It is used for assessing the risk to homes and other buildings in those areas, drawing up evacuation plans, creating hazard maps, and running disaster drills.

Environmental conservation and surveys

In ecosystem monitoring, GIS can track changes in land use and the state of deforestation, so you can monitor and analyze the impact on ecosystems. It is also used as basic material when designating protected areas and drawing up management plans.

Agriculture

GIS is used for farmland management. It combines soil data and weather data with crop information for each field to determine which crops are best suited to which areas, and to identify places that need fertilizing or maintenance.

Medicine and public health

GIS is used to understand how diseases and infections are spreading. For example, by plotting the distribution of infected people on a map and analyzing spread patterns, you can plan preventive measures and decide how to allocate resources effectively.

Population and daily life

By plotting where crimes and traffic accidents occur on a map, you can, for example, step up vigilance in places with many accidents or crimes and propose improvements.

GIS software

Many GIS applications exist, both paid and free. Here are some representative ones.

ArcGIS

The best-known paid GIS software is the ArcGIS series, developed by Esri.

It comes in several versions, including ArcGIS Pro, a desktop application, and ArcGIS Online, which runs in a web browser. It offers advanced spatial analysis and visualization, and many government agencies, companies, and schools have adopted it.

QGIS

The best-known GIS software that is free to use is QGIS (Quantum GIS).

Because QGIS is open source software, it is developed and maintained by a community. Its user base is growing worldwide, helped by the fact that it runs stably compared with other open source GIS software and runs on multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. It has many built-in analysis functions, and plugins add an even wider range of tools. Users can also develop and publish their own plugins.

GRASS GIS

Like QGIS, GRASS GIS is open source GIS software. It is especially strong in terrain analysis. It offers very advanced functions for managing, analyzing, and modeling geospatial data, and it is widely used at research institutions and in environmental analysis.

Conclusion

GIS does more than display maps. It is a powerful tool for visualizing, managing, and analyzing information related to places. By using GIS, you can understand a situation from more perspectives.