Encyclopedia of GIS

Abstract

Interest in Geographic Information Systems, Science, and Services (GIS) has tremendously grown in recent years in many different ways. Researchers from a variety of academic disciplines are using spatial thinking and GIS tools to develop spatially-explicit models. Broad public interest in this subject is being fuelled by popular applications like Google maps, personal navigation devices, MapQuest, etc. Web-based software developers are increasingly exploring mash-ups integrating different information sources to web-based maps, such as Google Earth and MS Virtual Earth. Therefore, there is a need to bring key GIS concepts and results to a diverse audience as current GIS literature (e. g., textbooks, journals, conference-proceedings, trade-books) largely caters to either GIS specialists or end-users of popular GIS software.