Geographic Information Systems (GIS) facilitate access to data sets on features that vary across space. Many of these themes are important for economic development (e.g., demographics, infrastructure, buildings and site locations, income, services, traffic patterns, human resources, public health). GIS is particularly useful for relating, integrating and analyzing information from these different themes (or layers) of spatial information.

GIS can help civic leaders, businesses and economic development agencies understand target markets and address the needs of neighborhoods, businesses and customers, homeowners, the general public at large. To give a very simplified example, if one GIS layer provides the spatial distribution of housing occupancy (residential densities) and another indicates the location of available commercial buildings classed by size and infrastructure, and another provides information on the location of potential competitors, a GIS program can be used to identify promising sites for a new business that is considering your town or city.