Thematic mapping is fundamental to any GIS. In most systems, this is accomplished by combining polygon features (e.g., ZIP codes, land use areas) with attributes (e.g., median household income, housing density), developing a classification scheme (e.g., classes), and then visualizing. After acquiring census block group data, ArcGIS Pro (Pro) was used to convert, build class intervals, themes and a population density visualization. This visualization was then used to develop a 3D rendering, commonly called a prism map in this context. ArcGIS provides this capability out of the box through the development of global or local scenes.

Point in polygon queries are all the more powerful when paired with drivetime analyses. Drivetime polygons can be used to evaluate the accessibility of a point across a road network. For example, a 10 minute drive-time polygon around a shop can be used to determine which people are most likely to shop at the store. After acquiring and geocoding university locations, ArcGIS Online (AGOL) was used to generate drivetimes, and analysis performed in AGOL or Pro.

Some of the biggest challenges, and significant costs of developing a GIS lie in data acquisition and development. For many projects, required data sets may be freely available and easily imported into you GIS of choice. For just as many, if not more, data may not exist at all, it needs to be collected, created, and/or converted to be of any use. In this application, sources for building footprints were identified, conditioned, and visuzliztions built in Pro. 

Some or the first deployments of commercial off the shelf (COTS) GIS were in support of urban and regional planning efforts. Planners develop land use plans and programs that help create communities, accommodate population growth, and revitalize physical facilities in towns, cities, counties, and metropolitan areas. This work requires a massive amount of data, to understand the current state, envision, build plans, and take actions to achieve a desired future state. In this application, MapInfo Professional was used to develop a production quality map series including land use, zoning, habitat, soils, and relate man-made and natural features. 

Like Web GIS, in the early 1990's time series capabilities were not a standard feature set in any COTS products. However, with a bit of creativity, data management skills, some coding, and an MPEG encoder, animation of time-series data was possible. In this example, hospital counts in China were analyzed over a 37 year period.

In the early 1990's, Web-based GIS did not exist. This forced developers to piece together server products like Arc/Info, with CGI scripts, C libraries, and HTML to get GIS on the Web. In the 1990's, vendors such as ESRI and MapInfo, developed their own offerings making development infinitely easier. In this application of MapInfo MapXtreme, a back-end geodemographic segmentation data set was utilized to provide Web access to geodemographic reporting.

Three common GIS data types include vector, raster, and grid. Grids are also called thematic rasters as they are cell based, with each cell containing one value representing the dominate value of that cell. A popular algorithm for converting from vector to grid data is to use an inverse distance weighed (IDW) function. IDW interpolation estimates unknown values with specifying search distance, closest points, power setting & barriers. In this application, thousands of data points were use to create a 1 KM grid of population in Mexico.