Geospatial Integration

Coming less from a geography background than a software background has meant relying on many external resources to understand how GIS web resources are to be used and more importantly why they work that way.

Some of the best resources:

Major GIS Providers

• ESRI is one of the major players in the field of GIS software, but the strong community and conferences are almost more important.
• Open Geospatial Consortium is the open source alternative used by numerous governmental and scientific organizations worldwide.
• The GIS Lounge has a list of additional products that provide GIS capabilities through the web.

GIS Communities

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• If you like .Net and C# some of the most capable and vocal people in the community have produced an open source GIS offering called SharpMap.
• TheGIS Lounge discusses all topics GIS.
• The federal government provides the largest body of resources that can be served by MobileGIS at the Geospatial One Stop.
• The major providers in the federal government are the U. S. Geological Survey with the National Map and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which features a favorite site called nowCoast with weather and other coastal information.
• For scientific research, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory publish OnEarth and PIGWAD for viewing the earth and other planets respectively.
• If that is not enough, Skylab Mobile keeps a worldwide list of OGC servers from the municippal to the national to the global.

what is gis?

As with so many topics, Wikipedia provides a long explanation of Geographic Information Systems.

The shorter answer is that GIS is a set of mathematics and technology that takes any pieces of information that can be associated to a place- whether a picture, a temperature, or the number of earthquakes in the last decade- and makes it relatable to any other piece of information about that place and the places around it.