Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Short Courses in Geology Series, Volume 10.

Geographic information systems are computer software packages for acquisition, manipulation, and display of data characterized by geographic coordinates. Commercial GIS programs are essential tools for many purposes, including maintaining property tax records, managing public services and utilities in cities, and creating inventories of natural resources such as forests. Anything that can be represented as a point, line, or area on a map can most efficiently be maintained in a computer system by software that takes explicit advantage of the spatial relationships between its parts–that is, by a geographic information system.