| A Valuable new way to map our land
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All Rights Reserved
Ottawa Citizen
November 17, 2004 Wednesday
Final Edition
SECTION: CITZ; Barry Wellar; Pg. B4
LENGTH: 793 words
BYLINE: Barry Wellar, Citizen Special
BODY:
Today marks the marriage of computer technology with geography in Canada -- something called "Geographic Information Systems." But many people in Ottawa don't know that much of the work in this valuable field of applied study and research, popularly called GIS, has its roots in this city.
The field of GIS was conceived in the 1960s and is now a $70-billion enterprise worldwide. A major influence on the origins of GIS was the government of Canada, which funded research, development and applications programs to support advances in computer and communications technology. The federal interest in GIS was to find better ways to map and manage Canada's vast land, water, forestry, ice cover, agricultural and other resources.
Then, in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, the "information society" emerged, and the GIS field added many new users and numerous different uses.
In addition to the continuing federal presence, GIS was embraced by provincial and municipal governments, businesses, the media and various disciplines and professions -- geography, planning, engineering, demography, environmental studies, surveying, assessing, hydrology, medicine and epidemiology.
The common interest among GIS users was the need to know where things are, that is, their geographic or spatial locations, distributions and patterns, and especially their linkages or connections.
It was the diversity of GIS uses, however, that was the driving force behind the widespread adoption of GIS. The following functions and applications are indicative of contributions made by GIS to serving the information needs of citizens, governments and businesses: providing geographic base maps at national, regional and local scales for weather reports; displaying election results; showing the locations of utility networks, real estate transactions, and the spread of infectious diseases, pollution plumes, and forest fires; compiling land-use maps at various scales to reveal loss of prime agricultural land, development activities and urban sprawl trends; combining data from satellite imagery and field work to illustrate the shrinking and thinning of ice caps, and the impact zones of ocean oil spills;
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GIS in the News
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integrating data from cameras, police reports and traffic count programs to monitor traffic flows, identify problem locations for pedestrians and cyclists, and apply indexes and other measures to make decisions about intersection modifications, network expansions, routing emergency vehicles, or assigning traffic police to priority locations; and, specifically for business, identifying preferred locations for retailing, warehousing and industrial activities, and selecting the best routes for moving goods to markets.
Throughout the '70s, '80s and '90s, GIS researchers, companies and consultants were challenged by users to expand the coverage of geographic data bases at the global, national, provincial and municipal levels, to reduce the cost and time of processing geographic data, to improve GIS analysis-synthesis capabilities and to enhance the ways of displaying results of GIS investigations. Which brings me to making the case that on GIS Day 2004, the University of Ottawa rules. In terms of compiling, processing and displaying geographic data and information, the 10 workstations in the Geomatics Lab directed by Prof. Mike Sawada are leading edge. It would have taken 64 high-level PCs in 2000, 1,280 in 1992, and about 13,000 in 1985 to match up with ours. If we go back to the early 1970s, mainframe computers the size of the Corel Centre come to mind.
Fortunately (pay attention Maclean's magazine), the true test of who rules in GIS is defined by what you get for your money, not how much you spend. The best measure of performance is what students are learning about science and society, and how GIS research and applications can contribute to both domains.
The following GIS projects illustrate why University of Ottawa students are making presentations at national conferences and winning national competitions: Integration of GIS and 3D modelling for scientific visualization of vegetation change; urban mapping for health planning; using GIS to plan broadband communications systems; a GIS-developed trail proposal for Pukaskwa National Park's Tip Top Mountain; GIS-based modelling for soil erosion in Eastern Ontario; GIS for developing a 2021 Ottawa light-rail system; and, GIS as a tool for analysing winter and summer vehicle collisions in Ottawa.
For more on GIS Day 2004 at the University of Ottawa, go to www.geomatics.uottawa.ca .
Barry Wellar is professor of geography at the University of Ottawa. He began GIS research in 1967 at Northwestern University in the first NASA study to investigate using satellite imagery for urban and transportation applications.
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