| Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computer system that analyzes and processes mass geographical data. It is a general technology capable of capturing, storing, managing, examining, displaying and applying data of all or part of the earth's surface and space, as well as scrutinizing information of geographical distribution. Since its introduction in the 1960s, GIS has been in rapid development and continuous advancement. With regard to its advantages of high-speed process and effective strategic devising, it has also become a significant tool for decision making at the national level and multi-objective development programs at the regional level. Furthermore, GIS has been extensively applied to various resource management, planning and design, disaster monitoring, health care, national defense, and military projects. Recently, the development of GIS evokes the wide concerns from all the society. So it makes sense of deeply understanding the concept and the application of GIS by studying the history of GIS development.This dissertation universally focuses on the production background, development course, technology innovation and application, etc. of the GIS phylogeny. Specifically, we have summarized the internal and external force promoting GIS development: theoretical development, application requirement and technical support; described its stage of development aboard from the formation in 1960s, development in 1970s, application and dissemination in 1980s and socialization in 1990s, compared and analyzed which with the domestic four stages: the preparation in 1978 ~ 1980, starting in 1980 ~1985, development in 1985~1995, and industrialization in 1996~now. Findings show that: GIS field in our country, being now of certain scale, was established relatively late but developed rapidly. It is necessary to fully understand the present state and problems as cognition, talents, quality of data, security issue and network construction so as to achieve the rational judgment of gridding, standardized, data commercialized, system specialization, entrepreneurial, global, popular, structure modular and integrating GIS development direction, all by dint of comparing the GIS history to progresses of the computer and network, developments of science and technology at different times, integrating research hotspots, such as object-oriented, space-time, GIS modeling and three-dimensional research work, into the GIS system.This dissertation is divided into six sections, unfolding as follows. The first section introduces the significance of this research, discussing both domestic and foreign research statuses and contents. The second section presents the fundamental concept, characteristics, systematic structure, crucial technology, and application examples of GIS. This section illustrates the premises of GIS's development history. The third section underlines the driving force of GIS's development from both internal and external aspects, revealing the real dynamic of its progress. The next section outlines the development stages of and provides a comparative analysis of geographic information system at home and abroad. This is followed by a summary of critical issues in the course of GIS's advancement through an examination of its development history, and a rational analysis and assessment of its future developing trends. The concluding section highlights the major findings resulted from this research paper. After dissertation's research, the developing direction of GIS tends to many dimensions, networking, intelligentization and integration.GIS will play a more important role on people's life in the future. |
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