Geographic Information System (GIS) Technology and Business Intelligence (BI)

GIS is a geographic information system (GIS) integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. GIS allows people to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts. A GIS helps users answer questions and solve problems by looking at the data in a way that is quickly understood and easily shared. GIS technology can be integrated into any enterprise information system framework. It’s enabling people to use geographic patterns and insights to predict and plan for the future, with truly transformational results. 

A GIS stores data on geographical features and their characteristics. The features are typically classified as points, lines, or areas, or as raster images. On a map city data could be stored as points, road data could be stored as lines, and boundaries could be stored as areas, while aerial photos or scanned maps could be stored as raster images. GIS stores information using spatial indices that make it possible to identify the features located in any arbitrary region of a map. For example, a GIS can quickly identify and map all of the locations within a specified radius of a point, or all of the streets that run through a district.

A typical BI implementation consists of applications selected from a suite of applications comprising the entire BI technology stack. This ability to "pick and choose" applications results in solutions tailored to the specific needs of end users. However, there are applications that tend to be common to nearly all implementations by a given provider. These common applications are the most cost-effective points of integration for GIS. The ArcGIS family of products is well suited to this implementation environment, and BI providers have been quick to see the value in the integration options offered by ArcGIS. It’s enabling people to use geographic patterns and insights to predict and plan for the future, with truly transformational results. 

A GIS stores data on geographical features and their characteristics. The features are typically classified as points, lines, or areas, or as raster images. On a map city data could be stored as points, road data could be stored as lines, and boundaries could be stored as areas, while aerial photos or scanned maps could be stored as raster images. GIS stores information using spatial indices that make it possible to identify the features located in any arbitrary region of a map. For example, a GIS can quickly identify and map all of the locations within a specified radius of a point, or all of the streets that run through a district.

Some of the GIS capabilities is:

Maps and Layers

• The Create-a-Map Wizard allows users to easily create presentation-ready maps using their own data or the default maps
•  The Display Manager allows a map to be customized on-the-fly
• User-defined preferences for map units, left/right side-of-road routing, file permissions, initial map choice, geo-coding parameters, and many other setting
• Toolbox and mouse-based map navigation is supported and includes panning, zooming, and magnifying.
• Map bookmark management allows the retrieval of custom map views
• Multi-layer map feature query tools allow direct interrogation of spatial locations
• A map librarian/manager allows the organization of various saved maps and comes with a library of pre-styled demographic maps
•  Geographic database layering controls allow customization of layer visibility and drawing order
• Multiple maps can be open simultaneously, and can be duplicated, combined, synchronized, tiled, cascaded and minimized/maximized
• There is explicit map scale control including undo
• Layer auto-scaling allows customization of the scale at which layers are visible
• An interactive map overview window provides perspective as you work and the ability to zoom anywhere in the study region

Visualization

• Extensive layer style control includes font/style/opacity settings for points/line/areas/labels/legends/drawings; point and area styles can use most image formats and their resolution can be controlled via scaling
• Thematic visualizations include color, pattern/icon, dot-density, chart, scaled-symbol, and 3D prism themes
• A drawing toolbox is provided, he drawing items are customization, and there is a selection of north-oriented arrows
•  Each map has an editable legend that automatically lists displayed features and has a live scale bar
• Stand-alone charting capabilities include pie, bar, line, area, scatter, and function charts
• Advanced text label placement and management tools include live label manipulation en-masse or individually, automated positioning, callouts/rotation, font control, multi-line, framing, hiding, styling, prioritizing, stretching, spacing, autoscaling and additional text manipulation settings
• Maps and graphics can be copy/pasted or saved as pictures/bitmaps (with optional quality/resolution settings) for insertion into MS Office and other external applications
• Printing to any printer/paper size is supported, with a wide variety of spatial print options including using fixed scale, with actual point sizes, and as pre-rendered images
• Report/layout creation can utilize settings for snap grids, rulers, paper size/orientation, dimensions, margins, alignment, print options, automated district printing, and a variety of other graphics software oriented options.
• Map interaction can be recorded to video
• Layer style/label/autoscale override is provided through the Feature Display tool
• Cartographic coloring uses Brelaz's Dsatur algorithm to assign colors that ensure that no two adjacent regions have the same color

Geocoding

• The tabular and geographic find tool can identify locations anywhere on earth
• Robust and flexible pin mapping tools support geocoding by address, postal code, city/town, join, coordinate, longitude/latitude, by any populated place in the world (village, town, city), and also manually
• Custom geocodable indexes can be crated to pin-map based on external datasets
• Geotagged images from smart phones, tabets, or GPS-enabled devices can be mapped

Geographic Analysis

• Length/area measurement tools allow map-based calculations
• Districts/Territories can be created using map-based filters or via tabular groupings
• Circular buffers/bands for analyzing proximity
• Geographic overlay/aggregation is supported and allows attribute assignment between layers based on percentage overlap
• Areas-of-influence (also known as Thiessen Polugons or Voronoi Diagrams) are a powerful GIS tool that divide the study area using a triangulated irregular network (TIN)
• Desire lines (also known as spider diagrams) allow the visualization of flows
• Kernel-based density grids can be created using the quartic, triangular, uniform, or count methods, and allow "hot-spot" mapping
• Weighted center calculations allow the identification of centers of "gravity" among points
• The shortest path calculations allow for minimizing the cost of the path as an ordered/unordered route with options to produce directions and to return to the origin
• Drive time/distance bands and partitions are advanced network analysis tools that allow regions across a line layer to be defined based on network cost
• Surface analysis tools include spot height data querying, surface profiling, viewsheds, contouring, 3D terrain visualization, DEM/TIN creation, and the calculation of terrain shortest paths
• Data classification method include: quantiles, equal weight, equal interval, standard deviation, nested means, arithmetic or geometric progression, Fisher-Jenks/optimal breaks, categories, and manual classification (by range, counts, or percentages)
• GPS support includes the ability to read/animate/import GPS data, overlay tracks with aerial photos and topographic or vector maps, track real time GPS locatoion, create vector line/point layers from GPS playback files, and import/export formats such as GPX (the GPS Exchage Format)