GIS

There are surprisingly many definitions of the term Geographic Information System (GIS). There are even those who take the acronym GIS to mean Geographic Information Science. The main decision in the definitions of GIS is between the definitions that see GIS as referring to a collection of software tools or as a collection of hardware, software, data, people, and methods. Today (2025), most people adopt the first definition, e.g Wikipedia and ESRI, while both organisations, until the late 1990, use a variant of the latter definition

Within the SemanticGIS project, we use the following definition: A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a collection of computer-based tools focused on collecting, analysing, visualising, storing, editing, and managing Geospatial data.

Often, the tools are organised into a coherent desktop processing environment, such as QGIS or ArcGIS pro. But a GIS can also consist of a programming environment such as JupyterLab, typically in the programming language index, using a series of common index There are many GISs out there, and index is often a hard job Closely related to the term GIS are the terms GIS project, which is a project that uses GIS to solve Geospatial problems and Geoinformatics, which is the science of geospatial processing and its application