Geographic Information System (GIS)

A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computer system that stacks different kinds of information on top of a map, layer by layer, so they can be viewed and analyzed together. Picture a set of transparent sheets: one shows roads, another shows population density, another shows flood risk zones. GIS lets you overlay or remove these sheets as needed to answer questions like "where do roads and flood risk zones overlap?"

The core idea is storing location information on a map together with the numbers, statistics, and attributes tied to each place, then making all of that searchable and computable. So GIS isn't just a tool for drawing pretty maps — it's really a tool for analyzing data based on location. It's widely used for problems where "where" matters, such as urban planning, disaster response, and optimizing logistics routes.

More recently, GIS is increasingly combined with AI techniques that automatically analyze the massive amounts of location data gathered from satellite imagery and sensors and find patterns in it, instead of having people review it all by hand.