The most common definition of GIS is geographic information systems. It is comprised of a full software and hardware system that can capture geographic data and information via cameras, store it via a database, manipulate it via software, analyze it via statistical and visualization tools, and manage and present spatial or geographic data. There are other well-known defination for GIS, such as geographic information science, although that has fallen out of general use as it refers to the academic discipline that studies geographic information systems. It is not commonly used for the definition of GIS, because it is a large domain within the much broader academic discipline of geoinformatics.

This essentially boils down to the ability to describe any information system that can combine, keep for future usage, manage, examine, distribute, and manifest geographic information...

Statistics is heavily used in GIS, and there is a special branch of statistics that deals with field data specifically. This special branch of statistics uses spatial data with a continuous index. It is able to provide methods to model spatial correlation and predict values at arbitrary locations, which is also known as interpolation.

When geographic phenomena are measured, the observation methods can dictate the accuracy of any analysis. There are limits caused by the nature of some data, where there is a constant or dynamic degree of precision that is always lost in measurement. This loss of precision is determined by the scale and distribution of the data collection.

When determining the statistical relevance of any analysis, the average has to be determined so that the points outside of any measurement can be included to their predicted behavior. Applied...

GIS is ending up, to a great degree, well-known with basic leadership as of late, and researchers have started to look profoundly into the social and political ramifications of GIS. Similarly, as with any frame and information accumulation and examination, GIS is defenseless to be abused to misshape reality for political and individualistic pick up. The generation, circulation, use, and portrayal of geographic data has been contended to be generally identified with the social setting, and furthermore holds the potential for expanded native doubt in the administration.

Different points that are investigated intensely are regarding potential copyright infringement, oversight, and protection. Many in the field are more hopeful, and they trust that the social approach that many will adopt is to strategize GIS appropriation as an instrument for open...

As discussed in the previous section, the application of GIS with augmented reality is only really hampered by your imagination, especially when you consider that there are tons of data types that you can utilize from GIS data. So, in the next section, we will go over and think of ways we can apply GIS to augmented reality applications and games.

As Richie Carmichael of the Esri Applications Prototype Lab said to Keith Mann in an online article (http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0311/augmented-reality-and-gis.html):

This mindset has been reflected by many companies such as Google, Tencent, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and many more. China’s Tencent has done quite a few things with augmented reality and GIS. I think it is very worthwhile to go over some of the things China have done with AR and GIS.

China does not use Google&...

Gaming and GIS is a very interesting topic, and there are a multitude of ways to incorporate this idea with AR since AR has different ways of being implemented. To really showcase a prime example of incorporating GIS into games and applying a form of augmented reality, we need to look no further than the most well-known MMO of all time, World of Warcraft.

To set the stage, we first need to explain some of the features of World of Warcraft and what data modders have to work with. World of Warcraft has many different professions that you can do, and all of them require that you collect the materials necessary to craft the items. There are different types of cloth, ore, flowers, archeology spot locations, cooking recipes, and many different crafting recipes that can be found all throughout the world. And this is ignoring armor, weapons, randomly spawning rare mobs...

In this chapter, we discussed the history of GIS, how GIS data is collected, how GIS data is used, GIS applications, GIS games, and how to incorporate GIS into augmented reality applications and games. There were many more interesting bits of information provided, such as the data formats and how they changed with time; we learned that GIS has many applications, both in the past and in the present for statistics and analysis, that will most likely continue to be used in the future here on Earth and on other planets, as we are starting to see with Mercury, Venus, Mars, and our Moon.

GIS is a broad field that has the ability to be applied in many different ways and for a variety of purposes, and in learning the basic fundamentals of GIS and its history, we can now apply that information to the games and applications we create. In the next chapter, we will learn about sensors...