In today’s world – the fl ow of information especially digital information has become
the critical ingredient for success in any activity. That is why, the period we live in is often
referred to as an information age.
It is a simple fact that everything human beings do, do takes place at a certain location
on the earth – it has a geographic component, although we tend not to think about it much.
The digital information revolution of the late twentieth century has allowed this geographic
information to be more easily accessed, analyzed and used than ever before. This led to the
development of GIS as a discipline and emergence of GIS as a core of digital technology.
The technology of GIS is spread over the domain of several disciplines such as
Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Sciences, Remote Sensing, Environmental Sciences and
of course Geography. Similarly, diverse is the list of its applications – Commerce, Governance,
Planning and Academic Research. These application areas are also growing and expanding
every day due to its power and vast possibilities.
Traditionally, the discipline of Geography dealt with spatial description and analysis.
Now in the era of multidisciplinary approach, students, researchers, professionals from
different disciplines fi nd their way into the emerging discipline of GIS making it popular.
The rapid expansion and popularization of GIS means that now GIS is not just for the
specialists, but for everyone, but these GIS users have different requirements. There are
numerous amounts of GIS learning material available in the form of textbooks as well as
posted on various websites. These literatures in general tend to be rather advanced and
designed for specialists while requirements of GIS beginners are some what ignored.
The present book is an attempt to provide basic fundamentals of GIS for beginners.

The book is evolved following the basic education approach, spreading onto three stages
of learning. The fi rst stage is about basic fundamentals, here development in technology
instigating the learning processes are discussed. This is spread over fi rst three chapters,
which introduces the beginners to the GIS as a discipline, its history, development and
evolvement process. The second stage is about the scope of the fi eld, here the emphasis is
on issues of technological advancements and revolution in spatial learning and their basic
concepts. In this section, four chapters (fourth to eighth) cover the breadth and also depth
of GIS, here geographic data, nature, structure, source and real world models are elaborated.
Lastly, the third stage of learning, where the approach works towards the development of
critical thinking, using the knowledge base acquired from the earlier chapters. The last four
chapters discuss geographic query, analysis, selection and future of GIS, project design and
management.