town and regional planning
MODULE 1
Historical Background
• The history of GIS involves some controversy as parallel development occurred in North America, Europe, and Australia. • Much of the published work on GIS focus on US contributions. • The Canada Geographic Information System or CGIS is the first GIS developed in 1960s . • Roots in Canada Land Inventory (CLI) mapping project : a multilayer land-use / planning map of Canada’s inhabited and productive land – around 1 million square miles. • CGIS was planned and developed as a measuring tool, a producer of tabular information, rather than a mapping tool. The first GIS was the Canada Geographic Information System, designed in the mid-1960s as a computerized map measuring system. • Although GIS had many roots, but Dr. Roger Tomlinson is said to be its father. • The second burst of innovation occurred in the late 1960s in the US Bureau of the Census, in planning the tools needed to conduct the 1970 Census of Population. • The DIME program (Dual Independent Map Encoding) created digital records of all US streets, to support automatic referencing and aggregation of census records. • The similarity of this technology to that of CGIS was recognized immediately, and led to a major program at Harvard University’s Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis to develop a general-purpose GIS that could handle the needs of both applications – a project that led eventually to the ODYSSEY GIS of the late 1970s. • In a largely separate development during the latter half of the 1960s, cartographers and mapping agencies had begun to ask whether computers might be adapted to their needs, and possibly to reducing the costs and shortening the time of map creation. • The UK Experimental Cartography Unit (ECU)pioneered high quality computer mapping in 1968; it published the world’s first computer made map in a regular series in 1973 with the British Geological Survey. • The ECU also pioneered GIS work in education, post and zip
Historical Background
• The history of GIS involves some controversy as parallel development occurred in North America, Europe, and Australia. • Much of the published work on GIS focus on US contributions. • The Canada Geographic Information System or CGIS is the first GIS developed in 1960s . • Roots in Canada Land Inventory (CLI) mapping project : a multilayer land-use / planning map of Canada’s inhabited and productive land – around 1 million square miles. • CGIS was planned and developed as a measuring tool, a producer of tabular information, rather than a mapping tool. The first GIS was the Canada Geographic Information System, designed in the mid-1960s as a computerized map measuring system. • Although GIS had many roots, but Dr. Roger Tomlinson is said to be its father. • The second burst of innovation occurred in the late 1960s in the US Bureau of the Census, in planning the tools needed to conduct the 1970 Census of Population. • The DIME program (Dual Independent Map Encoding) created digital records of all US streets, to support automatic referencing and aggregation of census records. • The similarity of this technology to that of CGIS was recognized immediately, and led to a major program at Harvard University’s Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis to develop a general-purpose GIS that could handle the needs of both applications – a project that led eventually to the ODYSSEY GIS of the late 1970s. • In a largely separate development during the latter half of the 1960s, cartographers and mapping agencies had begun to ask whether computers might be adapted to their needs, and possibly to reducing the costs and shortening the time of map creation. • The UK Experimental Cartography Unit (ECU)pioneered high quality computer mapping in 1968; it published the world’s first computer made map in a regular series in 1973 with the British Geological Survey. • The ECU also pioneered GIS work in education, post and zip