Wiki Description: A geographic information system (GIS) is a computer application for capturing, storing, checking, and displaying data related to positions and things on the Earth's surface (spatial data). GIS can show many different kinds of data on one map, such as streets, buildings and vegetation. GIS maps have layers where users can turn on/off selected assets and visuals.

The market gorilla in GIS is ESRI and most customers you encounter in the utility industry will use ESRI’s ArcGIS platform. Other GIS products include Bentley, Autodesk and QGIS… but there are 100s of others.

While we use GIS for fiber or pipeline mapping, just about every other industry also uses ArcGIS. Here are well-known organizations and companies that use GIS for a variety of applications:

Every time you hail a ride, Uber is a company that relies heavily on geospatial data. World Health Organization for tracking pandemics and health of populations. National Park Service for land maps. Agriculture for droughts, crop layouts and disease mapping. Law enforcement for crime tracking and hotspots.

Need to know: ESRI established a standard of GIS datasets types known as “shapefiles”. Google came up with their equivalent called KML (or KMZ for the zipped version).

Other file types include GeoJson and CSV. 

UTTO - Copyright IPEG Corp 2023