Seeing is Believing — Geographic Information Systems

‘One picture is worth more than ten thousand words.’ This anonymous Chinese proverb has never been more relevant than in the age of computerised information technology. The common output of all the number crunching and data manipulation that computers provide can be over-whelming stacks of numbers, tables and database reports. Of all the methods for analysing and presenting large volumes of data and the relationships between them, graphics are usually the simplest, clearest, and most powerful. And of all graphic formats, maps are able to convey the greatest amount of data in the smallest space, and facilitate viewing and thinking about that data at many different levels of analysis.