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Geographic information system (GIS) is a system designed to capture, store,
manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographical data. The acronym GIS is
sometimes used for geographical information science or geospatial information studies to
refer to the academic discipline or career of working with geographic information systems. In
the simplest terms, GIS is the merging of cartography, statistical analysis, and database
technology.
A GIS can be thought of as a system – it digitally creates and “manipulates” spatial
areas that may be jurisdictional, purpose, or application-oriented. Generally, a GIS is custom-
designed for an organization. Hence, a GIS developed for an application, jurisdiction,
enterprise, or purpose may not be necessarily interoperable or compatible with a GIS that has
been developed for some other application, jurisdiction, enterprise, or purpose. What goes
beyond a GIS is a spatial data infrastructure, a concept that has no such restrictive boundaries.
In a general sense, the term describes any information system that integrates stores,
edits, analyzes, shares, and displays geographic information for informing decision making.
GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries (user-created
searches), analyze spatial information, edit data in maps, and present the results of all these
operations. Geographic information science is the science underlying geographic concepts,
applications, and systems.
What then are Geographical Information Systems? The narrowest answer to this is to
regard GIS as a type of software. In simple terms, a GIS is a computer package that is
designed to represent Geographical Information effectively. It is, therefore, a system that
allows us to handle information about the location of features or phenomena on the Earth’s
surface. This is usually done by combining a database management system (DBMS) with a
computer mapping system. Thematic information that says what a feature is stored as a row of
data in the DBMS. Technically, this is referred to as attribute data. Each row of attribute data
is linked to information on where the feature is located. This is termed spatial data and is
stored using co-ordinates but is usually represented graphically using the ‘mapping system’.
‘Mapping system’ is perhaps an over-simplification, as in addition to providing the ability to
draw maps, this deals with all the functionality that is explicitly spatial, including responding
to queries such as ‘what is at this location?’ and calculating distances, areas and whether
features are connected to each other. A GIS software package is thus a geographical database
management system.

2.Answer the following questions:

1. Give the definition of the term “Geographic information system”.
2. What does GIS consist of?
3. What is database management system?
4. Explain the meaning of the term “GIS software package”.
3. Give the English equivalents from the text:

Геоінформаційна система, геопросторова інформація, статистичний аналіз,
технологія баз даних, просторові координати, програмне забезпечення, комплект
обчислювального обладнання, місцезнаходження, система управління базою даних.

4. Fill in the blanks with the words from Text 7. Translate the sentence into
Ukrainian:

1. Geographic information system (GIS) is a system designed to capture, __________,
manipulate, __________, manage, and present all types of __________.
2. What goes beyond a GIS is a __________, a concept that has no such restrictive
boundaries.