Everything is tied to geography. Your house has an address. That address is tied to the landscape. That address can then be used for 911 dispatching, the location to send your bills (ugh), and that little corner of earth called home where you store your stuff. In front of your house is a street. That street is tied to a network of other streets in your community. This allows us all to travel around town to all the unique locations we need to get to, like our own home.

Now, let’s take this a little farther. Let’s say, you have to use 911. When you call in to a dispatcher, you give them your address as well as what is wrong with you. Because your address is unique and is locatable within the network of roads, the emergency medical services knows where you live, how to get there, the fastest way to get there, and alternative routes in the event the main one is blocked.

Because everything is tied to geography, it can be mapped. This is where Geographic Information Systems (GIS) comes in. GIS is commonly defined as a system of hardware and software used for storage, retrieval, mapping, and analysis of geographic data. While that is an adequate definition, many people are left wondering what the heck all that means. So, simply put, GIS combines the spatial aspect that you see (the map) with the attribute aspect (the database) to produce "Smart Maps." These smart maps allow you the user the ability to ask the map a question and get a database answer, or ask the database a question and get a map answer. Additionally, GIS works with layers of information, all which are geo-referenced or referenced to the earth’s geographic coordinates, that can be looked at or analyzed against itself or against each other. In our example above, your home is one layer of information with all the other homes or 911 addresses you community. The roads we mentioned earlier is a separate layer of information that we can analyze the 911 data against. So, in looking back at our initial scenario, the dispatcher when she gets the call can plug in the address (the attributes) and get a map answer, the location of your house. And because GIS works with layers of information, she can see which EMS district you’re in or where the closest ambulance is located and send them to you for the most rapid deployment.

These same principles can be carried over into every major discipline or industry in some way or another. For example, I’ve been involved in the Oil and Gas industry as a consultant for GIS and GPS for the past 4 years. In my time, I’ve watched brokers working for their client companies create incredulous amounts of information (paper). A typical buy area that starts with landmen going into to purchase leases for rights to drill into generate paperwork in: