Geographic Information Systems
A Map Of Our Future To The Future.
Geography. It’s a lot more than pointing out places on a globe or learning about water bodies in different terrains. The one subject most of us used to shrug off is now one of the most useful subjects in the world of Computer Science. GIS stands for Geographical Information System which, in simple terms, helps process the gathered data and represent the information on a map. How it can be of any use to us? Online cab aggregators such as Ola, Uber or anything that uses GPS for that matter use GIS as its cornerstone.
How does GIS work?
Let’s take the example of Swiggy. Now Swiggy works on hyperlocal marketing strategies. The term hyperlocal corresponds to small geographical areas. Information is stored as a collection of layers linked by geography. The information layers stored concerning Swiggy are the restaurant layer, the customer layer, and the traffic layer. The data from these layers is then perused using GIS tools and represented on maps or as charts and graphs. This is how GIS works in very simple terms.
Where is GIS used?
One use of GIS is choosing the retail store location. Having two outlets can cause a retail store to go under severe losses. Factors like population, traffic, competition, location costs are taken into consideration. The work is narrowed down by using GIS.
Geotagging is another concept under the umbrella of GIS. By feeding coordinates of a location into an appropriate search engine, users can have access to a wide range of location-specific information. For example, Instagram users can tag a location. When the location is selected, we are redirected to a page where others have also posted it in the same place.
GIS, all in all, has been around for a while and will stay for quite some time. It is the science of where and places will never cease to exist. A billion issues are handled with the rise of GIS. With the aid of geotagging, by addressing these current limitations, future geographic multimedia retrieval systems will be able to better support user engagement with media.
