History
When GIS first became widely available in the 1980s and 1990s, the only source of geographic data for China was paper maps. Several universities elected to undertake the huge task of digitizing this information so that other researchers could use it.
The two earliest projects were conducted by The Australian Consortium for the Asian Spatial Information and Analysis Network (ACASIAN) at Griffith University and the China Data Center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. ACASIAN specialized solely in spatial coverages while the China Data Center included GIS coverages as a supplemented to their primary mission of providing Chinese statistical and census data.
There is a great deal of high quality GIS data being produced in China by both government organizations and private companies. Today, China's National Spatial Data Infrastructure Project, uses the WGS84 standard.
In 1991, China's first color Map Editing and Publication System, MapCAD.
In 1995, China's first National Advanced GIS Software, Computer based GIS, MapGIS.
In 2005, The fourth generation of large scale distributed structure GIS, MapGIS 7.0
In 2009, China's GIS new ero -- MapGIS K9.
Read more about this topic: Geographic Information Systems In China
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“... all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)