Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

The purpose of the Regional GIS program is to: 

1. provide its members direct access to MVRPC’s datasets and interact with MVRPC’s GIS to map and analyze data to meet their own needs; and 
2. address regional needs through on-going coordination and cooperation amongst organizations in the region.  

Two components of MVRPC’s Regional GIS Program are:

1. GIS Professional Services Support (PSS): A service-oriented program for MVRPC to assist and support its members to create, maintain, publish and access important geographic data and to utilize MVRPC’s GIS on a routine basis through project-specific partnership efforts.

2. Regional Geospatial Coordination (RGC): A working group of GIS professionals in the region to identify, prioritize, and take collaborative action to address specific regional project and data needs.

   These two components are meant to work together; as communities work with us through the PSS program and gain GIS expertise; they may then participate with the RGC. As ideas are developed at the RGC, they may circulate down to the communities and be implemented through the PSS program.

With these two components, participating members will realize the following benefits:

• Improved direct access to mapping and geospatial data
• Improved analysis capability and resources
• Enhanced access to value-added information through GIS
• Enhanced capacity for data-driven decision-making
• Enhanced data and information sharing across departments, facilitating innovative, shared solutions at the local level

GIS Basics

Geographic Information Systems or GIS is a collection of computer hardware, software, and database for capturing, storing, updating, manipulating, analyzing, and displaying all forms of spatially referenced data, commonly referred to as geospatial data.

There are two types of geospatial data:

• Vector Data: A data structure used to represent linear geographic features. Features are made of ordered lists of x,y coordinates and represented by points, lines, or polygons. Attributes are associated with each feature.
• Raster Data: A spatial data model of rows and columns of grid cells. Each cell contains an attribute value and location coordinates. Group of cells that share the same value represent geographic features

What does GIS do and what are the benefits of using GIS?

A GIS provides three distinct but interrelated functions to turn geospatial data into information to help understand the world in a spatial context. It provides a framework to manage geospatial data efficiently, an analytic tool to interpret relationships, patterns or trends in data, and a capacity to visualize the analysis through maps. With these function, a GIS provides benefits such as:

• Database Management: GIS data management shares many of the same concepts and characteristics with standard information technology architectures and enables an organization to achieve enhanced and efficient centralized geospatial database management.
• Problem Solving: GIS analytic capabilities provide tools to answer specific questions toward solving a problem based on various geospatial databases that are linked and related and applying appropriate analytical methods.
• Communication Mechanism: GIS provides opportunities to share information in a non-traditional fashion. A GIS provides a capacity not only to generate a static map of information but also to interact with various geospatial data through an interactive map.

MVRPC identified how GIS usage has changed over the years in the Miami Valley Region by analyzing trends from the three assessments, the results of which can be found here: Regional GIS Trends 2015-2024.