geographic information systems
type: Concept
narrower: GIScience

GIScience
definition: GIScience (geographic information science) is a scholarly discipline that addresses fundamental issues surrounding the use of a variety of digital technologies to handle geographic information, namely, information about places, activities, and phenomena on and near the surface of the Earth that is stored in maps or images. GIScience includes the existing technologies and research areas of GIS (geographic information systems, or GISystems), cartography (mapmaking), geodesy (measurement of the Earth itself), surveying (measurement of natural and man-made features on the Earth, also called geomatics in the United States), photogrammetry (measurement from photographs or images), global positioning systems (GPS, precise and accurate positioning on the Earth's surface aided by satellites), digital image processing (the handling and analysis of image data), remote sensing (observation of Earth from space or under water), and quantitative spatial analysis and modeling. [Source: Encyclopedia of Geography; GIScience]
broader: geographic information systems
type: Concept

concepts
type: Collection
type: ConceptGroup
member: GIScience