Future Applications of GIS: Depth vs Breadth- The case of the Land Use Profiler

As society becomes increasingly spatially enabled, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) will evolve, and geographical information will be embedded in most information applications and services that society uses. This trend presents many opportunities and challenges. It means GIS technologies will facilitate ‘more’ by becoming ‘less’. As the general use of GIS increases, the visible appearance of GIS decreases, as it becomes an integrated part of organisational and societal information systems. The trend is for GIS to move from a multi-use tool for project and departmental systems, to specific product systems for multiple users, multiple applications and multiple purposes. These new systems are not all technically GIS, but are systems with embedded geographic knowledge, and the data and tools to capitalise upon the capabilities and to facilitate distribution. The Land Use Profiler (LUP) system is an easy to use spatial analysis tool developed by the Department of Infrastructure in Victoria. It constitutes an illustration of these trends in GIS. Developed to locate areas of land best suited to particular land-use purposes, the LUP is a tool being piloted to facilitate preliminary investment decisions. The LUP adopts user-friendly interfaces, easy-to-assemble query structures and GIS embedding to facilitate broad-spectrum inquiries across a number of datasets using a ‘what-if-analysis’. The use and implementation of such a tool raises interesting issues about the transparency of spatial information processing. It reinforces the developmental trends of GIS and provides an indication where these trends may lead.