GIS are known to produce two broad types of maps; reference and thematic maps. Reference maps highlight natural patterns or synthetic features including the positioning and heights of mountains or the layout of bus routes. Whereas thematic maps highlight spatial relationships.
Some examples include:
Police hot spot analysis – analysing where crimes china rcs data are most prevalent in order to reduce crime or introduce/amend policy (thematic).
Accident analysis – visualising road networks to improve road safety measures (thematic).
Navigation – web maps such as Google Maps or apps such as City-Mapper (reference).
Farming – analysing the location of soil data in order to increase food production (thematic).
Spatial data, or geospatial data, is a data frame that contains information about a specific location, which can be analysed to better understand that location. GIS enables this spatial data to be processed and analysed.
There are typically two types of spatial data:
Vector data is the most common form and consists of points, lines and polygons.
Points are a pair of coordinates (i.e. a location of a missing person call).
Lines extend the points and include at least 2 points (i.e. the street that missing person call was received).