Geographical Information System (GIS) is a powerful software technology that allows virtually unlimited amounts of information to be linked to a geographic location. Coupled with a digital map, GIS records, stores, and analyzes information about the features that make up the earth's surface, thus allowing a user to see regions, countries, neighborhoods, and the people who live in them with unprecedented clarity.

GIS databases contain layers of information, each representing a particular type of geographic data such as demographic trends, soil types, income levels, voting tendencies, poverty rates, pollution levels, epidemics, transportation infrastructure, and Internet accessibility. A GIS database can include as many as 100 layers, a list limited only by the imagination. GIS incorporates powerful tools to analyze relationships among all these kinds of data. The effects of this new power on public policy are profound.

GIS portrays important information graphically-information that used to be available only as columns of numbers or charts. This simple innovation should not be underestimated as the applications of GIS are vast and continue to grow. Consider a few common examples

Public Safety: Looking at a GIS map of crime rates shows instantly locations by type of activity and how public safety funding may need to be shifted.

Health Organizations: A map of low-weight births shows public health officials how their prenatal-care program is working. Medical researchers use GIS to study connections between health and the environment. In the larger medical community, hospital administrators, pharmaceutical companies, managed care providers, and long-term care providers are starting to use GIS which offers enormous potential for improving services by organizing, using and distributing spatial information. GIS is useful for analyzing and visualizing any system that is spatial, for mapping a patients heart or brain, or showing a breakdown of diagnoses on a map of the body, or even indicating which beds on a hospital floor are occupied, for how long, and by whom.

Transportation: To understand the complexities, and to stay ahead of the ceaseless rounds of repairs, redesign, and new construction, transportation managers have increasingly turned to GIS. A map integrating cadastral boundaries and ownership with proposed new road alignments shows highway engineers optimal property acquisition. Which intersections have the most accidents, and which kinds of accidents occur most frequently? What time of day to they usually occur?

Utilities: Electrical engineers can manage their complex networks of power lines. It is not surprising that utilities all over the world use GIS to manage their operations-maintaining pipelines and transmission lines, building and operating power stations, making service calls, responding to emergencies. Everything takes place in the context of, and is thus manageable according to, location. These engineers also need land ownership data, and operations managers need customer demographics

Emergency Services: Fire and police departments can plan emergency routes. A GIS can be used to make maps-street networks, bus routes…. Not just static maps either. Digital maps can be updated constantly to make maps that show the current position of a train, or a fire truck, or maps of routes that change from day to day.

Environment: Natural resource managers are discovering the power of GIS to help them make the critical decisions they face daily. Once an expensive technology favored by research scientists, GIS emerged in the 1990s as the tool of choice in local and national resource agencies around the globe, and helping the development and conservation communities find common ground by providing a framework for the analysis and discussion of resource management issues.

And these GIS tools are increasingly accessible to citizens, policy makers, and the media through the Internet, itself expanding at an exponential rate.

GIS and other geospatial technologies are not new to government and public policy, including examples throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. But like other advanced technologies, it has often been regarded as exotic for specialists. This is rapidly changing. There is growing realization that almost everything that happens in a public policy context also happens in a geographic one: transportation planners, water resources studies, education committees, planning commissions, crime task forces, health care workers-all must consider questions of where along with how and why, and how much will it cost. GIS answers the first question, and helps answer the others.

As decision-makers become more familiar with the geospatial tools, the scope of their capabilities is expanding. In Latin America and the Caribbean, GIS has been instrumental to numerous institutions and programs, becoming in some an integral part of decision making, helping to shape and influence the context in which decisions are made.

• Inter-American Geospatial Data Network (IGDN) project promotes implementation of Internet capabilities throughout the Western Hemisphere for electronic access to information describing existence and availability of geospatial data. A project of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS/EDC), it is designed to enhance information infrastructure as called for by the Summit of the Americas in December 1994.
• By launching IGDN in 1996, it was recognized that GIS is used increasingly as a tool by governments, academia, business, and NGO's for planning and implementation of their activities. IGDN's strategy is to identify institutions in the Americas having important geospatial data holdings and develop their capacity to represent these holdings on the World Wide Web (WWW). The core technologies and standards of the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) for geospatial metadata content and Internet search-and-retrieval.
• The Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH) has created the "Status of Mapping in the Americas" index maps describing availability of geospatial data throughout the Americas. PAIGH's site is also hosted by USGS/EDC's servers.
• Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, Geografia e Informatica (INEGI) is a registered FGDC Clearinghouse Node providing a large quantity of digital maps of different themes and scales as well as statistical and census data.
• Guatemala's Instituto Geográfico Nacional "Ing. Alfredo Obiols Gómez", is a registered FGDC Clearinghouse Node for digital cartographic and other geospatial data of Guatemala.
• The Costa Rica GIS Data Clearinghouse provides a map gallery, tips on metadata construction, and biodiversity and natural resource maps of Costa Rica.
• The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) has an extensive website, supported by its GIS and Remote Sensing laboratories, with project examples and useful links to related sites.
• The CGIAR Consortium for Spatial Information is a global network of research laboratories, using GIS technologies for land use management, sustainable agriculture, and poverty alleviation.
• The 33 states and territories of the Wider Caribbean Region have joined in pursuit of a common goal-protection of the marine and coastal environment through promotion of balanced and sustainable economic development.
• Uruguay's Clearinghouse Nacional de Datos Geográficos contains references and metadata with over 3000 spatial data sets!
• Argentina's Secretaría de Desarrollo Sustentable y Política Ambiental website has a section of "Geoinformación" that includes definitions and concepts on GIS and geoprocessing; extensive list of maps, images and databases; examples of applications, case studies and projects based on GIS tools; and links to other related sites, training courses and events.
• The Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) is an open process for coordinating the organization, management and use of geospatial data and related activities, and has advanced through the leadership of many nations and organizations. From their site, one can search for over 220 collections of metadata to locate geospatial data of interest, as well as review the activities of their Technical Working Group, Legal and Economic Working Group, programs, news and publications. The 5th GSDI Conference, "Sustainable Development: GSDI for Improved Decision-Making," will be held at Cartagena de Indias, 21-25 May 2001.
• Permanent Committee on SDI for the Americas - PC IDEA

Some other useful links can be found on the page GIS links.

IDB has supported a range of projects involving GIS components, primarily for transportation infrastructure planning, land management and land titling, natural resources management, and population census activities. Recent examples include: