ABSTRACT
The earliest geographical information system (GIS) was designed and developed in the 1960s, and since then much progress has been made in developing tools for working with digital geographical information, and in bringing these tools to a wider audience through commercialisation (for reviews of the history of GIS see Coppock and Rhind, 1991; Foresman, 1998). Today, GIS has become a widely available approach to the solution of a large number of problems, from Earth science to local decision-making.
