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Examples of GIS applications

Historical research: monasteries in Netherlands

Historian Koen Goudriaan has a (web) database with descriptive information about medieval monasteries in the Netherlands. By adding geographic location data, this information can be accessed through a digital map of the Netherlands by means of GIS.
Visit Monastery map: Dutch medieval monasteries mapped to see the result.

Historical research: the outskirts of Haarlem in the nineteenth century

Historian Frank Suurenbroek has investigated how the outskirts of Haarlem transformed during the nineteenth century and which forces influenced this transformation. He used GIS to reconstruct the outskirts plot by plot for two moments in time: 1832 and 1900. To create this reconstruction he coupled a database with plot data to a digitized cadastral map as well as other other digitised map material, which can be projected over each other by software (in so-called layers).
Suurenbroek summarizes the benefits of using GIS in his research as follows: (1) GIS is a tool that can be used to study border areas (city outskirts are not an administrative unit and can therefore not be found as a unit in source material), (2) GIS can visualize the physical results of human action, (3) GIS can integrate the direct or indirect influence of physically nearby 'circumstances' into the analysis, (4) GIS can give insight into the geographical location and spread of more or less tangible facts such as land use, physical conditions, function, land owner and land user.
Sample projection [borrowed from Tijd en Ruimte. Nieuwe toepassingen van GIS in de alfawetenschappen, pp 102-115, see the page about spatial and temporal analysis].

Archeology: mapping the Via Appia

The project Mapping the Via Appia aims at a thorough inventory and analysis of the Roman interventions in their suburban landscape, focusing on parts of the 5th and 6th mile of the Via Appia in Rome. In this project, a traditional two-dimensional geographic information system (GIS) and relational databases are being employed to accurately store the data gathered during archaeological fieldwork. However, since archaeology inevitably involves the third – vertical – dimension, a 3D Gis was developed for the project. This system allows archaeologists to spatially store, share, visualize and analyse the complex archaeological features in a virtual 3D environment. Furthermore, the 3D GIS allows the inclusion of 3D-georeferenced historical images and virtual 3D reconstructions in a scientifically transparent way.
More information, including a video of the 3D reconstruction.

Linguistics: dialect research  

In linguistics, GIS is primarily used for dialect research, because dialects are of course closely linked to location. Linguist Piet van Reenen has teamed up with a group of colleagues to combine the pronunciations of a carefully selected set of words spoken by test subjects from all over Flanders and Netherlands with a digitized map of the area in question. This has resulted in, among other things, a dialect map of the Netherlands (the MAND - Morfologische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten). Click here for an example of such a map, on which the various pronunciations of the diminutive suffix in the word bruggetje are plotted on a map. In this project, GIS was used to create a visual presentation of the dialect data for individual words. In addition, statistical processes were used to map the transition between different pronunciations of a specific word through so-called isoglosses on the map. Example of an isogloss map (source: Meertens Institute, for more information see the January 2004 edition of Onze Taal.)
The Meertens Institute also publishes large numbers of dialect fragments that can be accessed through a map, see the Nederlandse Dialectenbank and particularly its Speaking map.

Other topics in this section: Statistical analysis   Network analysis   Spatial and temporal analysis