As Michael Sawada tours students or other visitors through the University's latest laboratories packed with powerful computers for researchers to explore sophisticated geographic concepts, he likes to point out that this burgeoning field of inquiry was ushered in and named right here in Ottawa.
“This is the birthplace of geographic information systems (GIS),” says the assistant professor of geography, referring to pioneering work that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s in the federal department of Energy, Mines and Resources, which is now Natural Resources Canada.
It was a time when computers were just starting to make their presence felt among geographers, who had only recently begun making widespread use of statistical and quantitative methods. They turned to this new technology for a major project called the Canada Land Inventory, which took stock of the physical and economic features of some 2.7 million square kilometres of the country.
The approach was dubbed ‘geomatics’, combining the terms ‘geography’ and ‘informatics’. GIS, which allow the application of geomatics to any spatial data, form the largest component of this science.
With the dramatic growth in widely available computing power since the 1980s, and the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the potential applications of geomatics and GIS appear unlimited. Eagerly embraced by scientists, governments, and entrepreneurs around the world, this kind of work now describes some $67 billion worth of activity every year.
Police departments, for example, use GIS to track when and where crimes are taking place, in order to determine the most effective locations for stationing officers. The University's Protection Services use GIS in much the same way (see Gazette, January 13, 2004). Multinational retailers like Sears Roebuck Co., Blockbuster video, Mailboxes Etc., and Canada Post, among others, locate their stores based on extensive geomatics inquiries, taking into account such factors as the shopping patterns and income levels of the population living near a prospective site. Forest management officials use similar strategies to monitor fires, pests, or the impact of logging in a given region.
“This was invented by geographers, dominated by geographers, and it has become the most marketable trade for geographers,” says Sawada.
It also defines the facility he founded and manages, the Laboratory for Applied Geomatics and GIS Science (LAGGISS), which just opened. This $500,000 undertaking, funded by a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Innovation Trust, will become the focus of university research in a diverse collection of subjects, including the modeling of ancient climates, telecommunications, population health, archaeology, agricultural planning, and the spread of invasive species.
The laboratory will also be one of several sites open for public viewing when the University hosts GIS Day on November 17, 2004.
Laboratory for Applied Geomatics and GIS Science
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