Geographic Information Systems (called GIS) are of growing importance in areas such as
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Defense where they underlie Mission planning and related systems
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Commercially for City Planning and with companies such as Power Utilities whose business involves spatially labelled assets such as gas lines, health care clinics etc.
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NASA's Mission to planet Earth will dramatically increase the availability of data such as that gotten today from Satellites such as LANDSAT and SPOT. Their multi-spectrum data can be used for many applications such as studying state of environment, crop growth etc.
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GIS will overlay such Satellite data on a background map
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Other GIS functions are often typical "scientific computing" algorithms such as Image Processing and solution of scheduling problems which can use optimization methods we will study in Case Study I).
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Note that the GIS is natural multimedia Interface to Spatially labelled data (E.g. video footage for tourism arranged by vacation location). This contrasts with Mosaic as natural multimedia document interface
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The magazine GIS World has a wealth of information about real world GIS applications and companies
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Map data is available (almost free) from the USGS (Geological Survey) and with additional features from several commercial companies. (See memo by Paul Coddington)
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