Today, November 20, is GIS Day, a day for geospatial and other professionals to celebrate the massive impact that GIS has on our professional and personal lives. It’s a special GIS Day as well, marking 25 years since the first formal GIS Day in 1999. The day of celebration was started by Esri president and cofounder Jack Dangermond – a fitting beginning given the company’s dominance in the market – who credits Ralph Nader as inspiring the idea for the day. On the official website for the day of celebration, they note that this year’s theme is “Mapping Minds, Shaping the World."
It’s a fitting theme to look at for the 25th anniversary, as they describe it as highlighting “how geographic information system (GIS) technology has changed the way we understand, navigate, and shape our world.” Recent years have seen GIS come into focus in a way we had never seen before, in large part thanks to the maps that everyone saw in 2020 throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, first showing where infections were being reported and later showing where test kits and ultimately vaccines were available.
Even so, it’s a technology that is still relatively unknown in proportion to how much it affects nearly every industry and walk of life in some capacity. It’s been said before that GIS is probably the most important technology you’ve never heard of, and while that’s not true of the people reading this I think most people reading can relate to others in their life not being sure what GIS, or geospatial more broadly, really means. This is where GIS Day comes into play, teaching people – particularly young people – about the power of these tools and the many ways it can be used to better professional, humanitarian, and personal pursuits.
It’s that range of use cases that really makes GIS such a powerful tool, and something that is increasingly true. Today, with nearly everyone walking around with a functioning GPS in their pockets at all times, location awareness and data is more important than ever, and people are thinking about it more than ever. And GIS comes into play for so many of them. We talked about the public health piece of the equation above, and local governments are using these tools for many of their initiatives, taking advantage of the ability to layer crucial data within proper spatial context.
Those public-focused use cases often get the most publicity, but businesses in many industries can benefit from the technology too. Consider a brick-and-mortar store looking to add a new location. Being able to cross-reference their existing footprint with demographic data as well as local real estate information gives a visual indication of where the next location can be. Similar workflows can be done to figure out where to put more marketing efforts, as an example.
And now that the technology is starting to become more known and stripped-down versions of the software can be found for free or very cheap, people are starting to use them for their hobbies. Birding, for example, became very popular during the pandemic, and people are using GIS maps to show where they spotted some of their favorite rare birds. Geo Week News has also covered how Tom Hebert has incorporated GIS into paleontology, something that started as a hobby and is now a full-time job.
That’s just where we stand today, 25 years after the inaugural GIS Day. Looking forward, I don’t believe it will be too long until we see GIS Day celebrating even more cutting edge tools and workflows, and a much wider audience. Just in the last couple of years, for example, 3D visualizations within GIS have become much more common. GIS has already had the advantage of being relatively easy to digest quickly, and being able to add in 3D visualizations makes it all the more intuitive. In fact, mixed reality is starting to be used as a method to view these visualizations, allowing professionals to be totally immersed in the spatial context.
Today, artificial intelligence is taking over every industry, and it should open up GIS to even more professions and people. GIS is, at its heart, just a way to visualize a lot of different data at once, and AI of course specializes in digesting large amounts of data. While GIS is already fairly accessible in some forms, adding in AI tools to give better insights to non-experts should open up the crucial technology to so many more, meaning GIS Day 2029, even – just five years down the road – could be another landmark for the industry.
