GIS

GIS as a data processing system has many pros and cons. Here are some things I discovered about it:

GIS is very user friendly. It is easy to learn to use because there is a lot of pointing and clicking- you don’t need to know any computer programming. It is also very aesthetically pleasing. You can change the colors of the background, add legends, and put little boxes around maps with very little effort. In GIS, you can relate the different maps and datasets to each other.

 It was simple to add a graph that displayed quantitatively what the map was showing qualitatively. You can also overlay different data sets easily by scaling them or adding an entire data column to a different layer. As a viewer, it is easy to tell what is going on in a GIS map because the legends are extremely helpful.

Even though we put in a bar graph, I feel as if GIS is very focused on the visual, qualitative aspects of graphs. This can be a good thing, but it might make analyzing data sets a little more difficult. Also, it was easy to add updates to the data/map (we added a new road), but it seemed unprofessional. Perhaps that is how all new roads are added, but I was concerned by how easy it was. You could just add whatever you wanted to without verifying that it is correct. You just pointed and clicked at where you wanted to go- there were no measurements or checks that the new road actually intersected the old road where we said it did. Maybe we will learn how to be more precise in the future.

Another thing I noticed was the importance of saving things in the correct places. This is something users have to learn to be exact about. I had to backtrack once because I saved a file in a space that was only one folder away from where it needed to be, but it may as well have been on a different computer since GIS could not find it. GIS is also very expensive. Most of the students in this class will probably never use GIS again, simply because we would never be able to pay $10,000 for a data processing system.