Historical outline

GIS can now look back on 60 years of history (see illustration). The term "Geographical Information System" was already introduced in the early 1960s when a computer-aided spatial information system was set up in Canada (Canadian Land Inventory System). With the increasing availability of powerful computer technologies, the public administration started larger basic projects under the term Land Information Systems (LIS) in the 1970s. Commercial products came onto the market in the early 1980s. In the 1990s, the focus was on the development of specialized information systems of various types. For example, the GIS became available in the form of a desktop GIS on the personal computer (PC) at the workplace. The international standardization activities beginning in the mid-1990s, e.g. by ISO (International Standardization Organization) with the ISO 191xx family of standards, and the work of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) led to an increasingly standardized view of the world of geoinformation at the turn of the millennium. Along with the rapid spread of the Internet, web services such as WMS (Web Map Service) or WFS (Web Feature Service) were specified with which geoinformation can be distributed interoperably on the World Wide Web. The focus lies on interoperability between systems. By the mid-2000s, at the latest, geoinformation entered the consciousness of citizens with the arrival of large software companies such as Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. Everyone is now able to use and receive spatial information in the form of interactive maps or route descriptions when searching in the Internet. At the European level, the adoption of the INSPIRE Directive (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) in 2007 marks the start of the establishment of harmonised spatial data infrastructures in all EU member states and beyond (further information can be found in Chapter 4 of Bill, 2016). Mobile phones are becoming more and more powerful, today's smartphones access geo-information, allow the user to locate the position at any time and operate it to the corresponding site with location-based services (LBS). In recent years, we have encountered open data in various places.