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About This Guide
This guide is a collection of all the geospatial resources that are available to you from the Geospatial Centre. The Geospatial Centre is the University of Waterloo's hub for GIS resources, including GIS data, workshops, tutorials, assistance and software. This guide organizes all the resources that are available to you, the novice or expert GIS user.
What is GIS?
A geographic information system (GIS) integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information.
GIS allows us to store, visualize and analyze spatial data. In its simplest form, this would mean creating maps and charts to visualize data, but GIS is much more than just that. In more advanced applications of GIS, we can run complex analyses to find trends and patterns between many datasets and analyze the impact that location and distance can have on our data.
A GIS helps you answer questions and solve problems by looking at your data efficiently and effectively displayed and easily shared.