Steve started work as a cartographer for British Antarctic Survey at a very exciting time (1995). As Prem Radhajrushnan recently wrote "The 1990s saw the advancement of GIS from a little-known science to a well-known technology.
Geographical Information Science (as theoreticians call it) or Geographical Information Systems (as
programmers call it) has transcended all boundaries of what the pioneers of this science had envisioned."
One of the first occurrences of geographical analysis is from an epidemiological study. Dr. John Snow
used a map of plotted points of cholera occurrences to isolate a water pump that he thought was
supplying contaminated water. When the tap was shut off, the outbreak of cholera was contained.
Today GIS has changed a great deal but the basic principle remains the same: the use of visual tools to
analyse data that has a spatial content for a specific purpose, in Dr. John Snow’s case it was isolating a
water supply that was causing cholera outbreaks.
Today we use GIS to simulate the movement of a pollutant, the spread of a disease, the eating habits of a nation, the planning of a city through to very simple procedures such as how to get the emergency services from a to b via the quickest route.
So can GIS help me, you might ask? This is an impossible question to answer of course, without knowing more about the nature of the enquiry. But if there is a 'where' in the query, then the chances are that GIS could be of use, since GIS is ideally positioned to answer the 'where' element of a "what, where, when" question. GIS can:
- Find an object or location (e.g. where is 12 The High Street?)
- Find a pattern (e.g. where in the country do the most knife related crimes occur?)
- It can map quantities (e.g. levels of air pollution in different parts of London)
- It can map densities (e.g. population per square kilometer)
- It can model what is inside a search area (e.g. number of fish caught within 10 kilometers of a contaminated site)
- It can model what is nearby (e.g. what shops are within 1kilometer of a proposed location)
- It can model what has changed (e.g. what industry existed at a particular location in the last 200 years)
For more information and ideas, see this page by ESRI.com
Many projects involve a huge spectrum of skills, often requiring to prepare, analyse, then package and distribute the results. Over the last 15 years Steve has gained a huge range of skills from a broad spectrum of projects. These include:
- processing census data at multiple levels
- processing traffic data, pedestrian counts and flows of traffic
- creating bathymetric mapping
- processing LiDAR data
- future forecasting transport changes
- carrying out nearest neighbour analysis
- modelling coral reef habitats
- population forecasting
- land use and transport modelling
- delivery of GIS via the Internet through a number of different software methods
- creating 'easy to use' GIS for kids and educational establishments
- processing complex 3D GIS queries
- and finally, not to be forgotten, creating maps!
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