Definition and Characteristics of GIS

KASS GREEN, American Society for Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing: Say you're in California, where I live, and you want to know how susceptible your house is to a wildfire.

[SIRENS]

So we put sensors, like our eyes, on satellites. We collect information, and then computers create maps. OK, now you have a map, so you want to analyze that map. Well, you'll take the information about the slope. Are you on a dead-end street? Do you have a lot of fuel around your house? You put all that information into a computer. And it can tell you how at risk you are for losing your home to a wildfire.

MARK BRENDER, GeoEye: Ever since the Babylonians etched the lay of the land on clay tablets in 2300 BC, mankind has needed accurate representations of the earth.

KASS GREEN: Maps used to be made on horseback in the 1800s. They took a long time to make, so we evolved to aerial photography, and that's made a huge difference with how humans understand the earth.

[PILOT'S VOICE]

JACK DANGERMOND, ESRI GIS & Mapping Software: In the '60s, people began to think about the notion of encapsulating or abstracting geography in a computer. And people could look at the database and visualizations or analytics. And that was just a magical idea.

[CROWD CHEERING]

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So help you God?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: So help me God.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Congratulations, Mr. President.

CONGRESSMAN JOHN SARBANES

: The Obama campaign took to a new level their use of technology with respect to mapping.

KASS GREEN: They knew what voters to target. They knew where the marginal voter was. And, frankly, the ones that use it the most effectively get elected.

MARK BRENDER: After 9/11, US troops went into Afghanistan, and they went in with Russian maps because who would ever think you'd have to have maps of Afghanistan.

VICE ADMIRAL ROBERT MURRETT: Geospatial intelligence has become really the foundation for just about anything that happens in the military. It has to do with understanding in a very time-sensitive fashion things that may be developing in different parts of the world.

HON. JAMES R. CLAPPER: It's the ability to enable decision makers, whether they're someone sitting in the White House or someone sitting in the foxhole.

MARK BRENDER: More than half the world's population now lives in urban areas. Thirteen of the 20 largest cities are on coastlines. So how do you model in potential rise of sea level because of climate change?

RICHARD ALLEY, Geoscientist, Nobel Prize Winner, Penn State: We simply could not know how the earth works without geospatial technologies telling us where things are, how they're related, how it's put together to tell us the story of what really is happening.

SCOTT EDWARDS, Amnesty International: The conflict in Darfur is over five years old now. Somewhere around 400,000 people have died. We wanted to go to the place, collect testimony, take photographs. The Sudanese government had very little interest in having us on the ground. So we purchased satellite imagery, and we saw whole villages destroyed. We took those images to the Sudanese government to let them know that people around the world were watching these villages remotely.

DAVID DIBIASE, Mapping Scientist, Penn State: For the insiders, the transition to digital geography has been truly revolutionary. We can navigate our world with much greater confidence then we could have before. It's changed the science agenda. It's changed the technology. It's created new occupations. But for those outside, who may not even be aware that there is a field called geospatial, it has made geography ordinary, which is the most revolutionary thing of all.