On 12/14/2006 09:01 AM, Landon Blake wrote:
The first thing is a question.
I have heard that one of the things that enable GIS to start in the
United States was the availability of the TIGER Shapefiles from the US
Census Bureau. Is this correct? Does anyone know where I might find some
published or online information confirming this? I’m putting together an
article on a concept I call “community Mapping” and I’d like to verify
and include this information in my introduction if possible.
Landon,
There were a number of events that enabled "GIS to start in the United
States," such as Tomlinson's early work with the CGIS, innovation at the
Harvard Graphics Lab, Scott Morehouse moving to ESRI in the early 1980s,
etc. The Census Bureau also played a significant role - in many
instances they found themselves at the forefront of innovation in
mapping and GIS, mostly because they HAD to find a way to effectively
process their data, which were inherently spatial in nature. This sort
of innovation can be traced as far back as the Bureau's use of
Hollerith's tabulation machine for processing the 1890 census data.
Another significant Census Bureau contribution was the DIME process,
which represented a huge step forward in the development of topological
data structures, and which eventually led to the creation of the TIGER
data. DLGs did exist prior to TIGER data (the USGS was digitizing John
Wesley Powell's early topographic maps), but are considered less
influential than the topologically-structured data produced by the
Census Bureau.
I recommend this book as a good all-in-one reference for exploring the
origins of GIS/LIS:
Foresman, T. W. (ed.). 1998. The History of Geographic Information
Systems: Perspectives from the Pioneers. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
You can also find more information here:
http://www.ncgia.buffalo.edu/gishist/
Cheers,
Dylan
_______________________________________________
Geowanking mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
