A Place in History - Section 4.8

The right of Ian Gregory to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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	A place in history: a guide to using GIS in historical research CHAPTER 4: BASIC GIS FUNCTIONALITY: QUERYING, INTEGRATING AND MANIPULATING SPATIAL DATA
	4.8 Conclusions: information from spatially detailed, integrated databases GIS software provides extensive functionality that allows a user to approach his or her dataset in a way that combines the spatial and attribute components of their data. This functionality leads to added value being extracted from an existing dataset. All datasets have limitations, and the extra functionality provided by GIS software allows us to use the data in ways that their creator would never have envisaged. As a result, it is important to consider the limitations of all layers when manipulating them with the GIS. It is also important to consider the limitations of the techniques used on the data, particularly those that integrate data together. As long as the results of spatial operations are understood within these limitations, GIS software provides new functionality that should allow new understanding to be derived from spatially referenced data. In this chapter we have started to see the usefulness of the combined spatial and attribute data model used by GIS. This allows data to be queried and integrated in ways that no other approach can manage. The key advantage of this is that it allows the complexity of the data to be handled without undesirable simplification of the data.


	© Ian Gregory 2002 The right of Ian Gregory to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All material supplied via the Arts and Humanities Data Service is protected by copyright, and duplication or sale of all or any part of it is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your personal research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. Permission for any other use must be obtained from the Arts and Humanities Data Service. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise, to any third party.