Peuquet D.J., Marble D.F. (eds.) Introductory Readings In Geographic Information Systems

Taylor & Francis, 1991. — 442 p.This book is intended as a supplementary reader for use in an introductory, upper-division or graduate-level course on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), as well as for practising professionals who wish to learn more about this technology. Although GIS have been in existence for over twenty years, they have only recently matured to the point where they have become accessible to geographers, planners, environmental scientists and others as an affordable and practical tool for spatial analysis. Much of the GIS literature is scattered over the journals and technical reports of a number of disciplines. These sources are often not widely available, especially to the newcomer to the field. This book was assembled to bring together what we believe is a balanced sampling of written works that cover important aspects of the basic principles involved in GIS, as well as to provide some examples of current GIS applications. As with all such compilations in a rapidly developing field, individual pieces in this reader may become quickly ‘dated’. Nevertheless, we feel that the principles and methods of analysis that they illustrate will have greater longevity, whatever the particular issues addressed by individual papers.
This book is divided into five major sections and an Introduction. Each section begins with some opening comments that are intended to provide an integrated perspective upon the works that follow. Each section introduction concludes with some selected suggestions for further reading. The Introduction and first two sections are designed to provide the reader with a general overview of GIS, while the remaining sections are devoted to providing more detailed discussions of some of the major issues relating to the practical and productive use of GIS technology.