Geospatial Information System Use: The results of a survey.

The rapid spread of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) into commercial, academic, and personal spheres through the last decade is indicative of the increasing demand for the utility GIS provides. Questions arise as to what users need and how different users are applying GIS tools and techniques daily. The answers to these questions will both answer critical questions in the researcher’s thesis question and guide the researcher in deciding which software coding solutions to utilize in crafting his thesis project. The results will better define the parameters used for testing the utility of Google Earth and open-source GIS platforms for small scale resource management. Positive outcomes include minimizing costs to these organizations while increasing access to geospatial data. This presentation represents a synopsis of results gathered through an online survey conducted by the researcher. The survey gathered answers related to the market sector (professional, academic, personal), spatial tool usage, cartographic use, geospatial programming knowledge, web-map familiarity, and the types of maps created. Survey results from a more comprehensive survey undertaken by the Urban and Regional Information System Association (URISA) will also be examined. The results from these two surveys will be used to select open source program libraries for use in developing a lightweight desktop GIS application within a Google Earth environment. Initial results indicate that a large percentage of respondents selected elementary GIS tools like spatial query in their everyday GIS activity, indicating that simpler tools are more ubiquitously used by a significant cross-section of GIS users