ABSTRACT
GIS is about more than just a piece of software. There are some foundational concepts that underlie all GIS systems and approaches, regardless of manufacturer or application area, which are covered in the first section. One of the main attractions of working with GIS is its visuality (the map) and in Section 5.2, we discuss its ability to explore spatial phenomena through the map interface as well as to use maps as an easy-to-use communication tool. GIS operations are a function of the data model underlying our housing data, and in Section 5.3, we present two most common ones: the feature and the field-based representation of spatial phenomena. The data model determines what kind of operations we can apply to our data and Section 5.4 introduces a small but powerful set of GIS operations, the application of which is illustrated in Section 5.5.
