GIS Applications

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to describe a range of GIS applications and identify their data and functional requirements. Due to the wide variety of GIS application domains, different approaches have been taken in representing spatial and non-spatial data. As we have already mentioned in Chapter 1, two major types of representation methods for spatial data are called field and object based representations. Field-based representation methods capture the spatial variation of attribute data. An example of field-based representation is that of the variation of soil characteristics (such as water holding capacity and porosity) over a given landscape. Object-based representation methods, on the other hand, associate attribute data with individual objects, and are suitable for applications requiring the relationships among objects that have both spatial and non-spatial attributes. Examples of spatial objects are property parcels and electoral districts (for land resource management), plant locations (for utilities), point locations of distribution channels (for market analysis), and city landmarks (for car navigation systems).