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The United States Geological Survey (USGS) defines a
Geographical Information System (GIS) as
``a computer system capable of
assembling, storing, manipulating, and displaying geographically
referenced information, i.e. data identified according to their
locations.''
Many types of geographical data can be used:
- Elevation
- Satellite image
- Digital line graph
- Land use / Land cover
- Geographic place names
Integrating these different data sets is a non-trivial problem.
Paul Coddington, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, paulc@npac.syr.edu