Could you be more specific about how you define identity? The word can have many references.

We have a classroom exercise you might be interested, its name is "portolan charts" and its being applied at UPN, Bogotá-Colombia, with students of "teaching of Geography". Would you like to know it in order to try to answer your question?

Yes, why not.

If interested please send a mailing address to [email protected] and i'll send you our record.

GIS has multiple applications. We can use the GIS tools to create specific identity for a particular feature during mapping work.

So, you when you define the word identity you mean the number of variables that you can use to assign attributes to something. That surely depends on the capacity of your software to replicate your research design and model your data.

Hi Roger,

Let me at first tell you that GIS was developed basically for monitoring environment so that on the basis of analysis carried out, results are visualized to protect and manage the degraded areas. However, some people started to use it for mapping. On the hand, Digital cartography is meant for mapping with its own software to this end.

Mapping is about abstracting and representing spatial objects in a simplified way that we mere mortals can be able to interpret. Cartographers then use cartograms and other tools to create beautiful maps. The quality of such maps could in some ways be used to define the identity of the mapper as would an artistic masterpiece. GIS provides the necessary tools to aid the cartographer in this quest, but as we all know, it provides more than just tools for mapping as it provides ways of interacting with data in wonderful ways. My take is that GIS Mapping as posted is more than a means of creating an identity ... it allows that but much much more.

Love this question! Yes indeed it can be used to visualize characteristics of place through a myriad of lenses: local, regional, population characteristics and density, the quality of land, water, plant growth, relationships of people to land and the changes that have take place over time. All these constitute an identity of place through its portrayal of characteristic through GIS. Indeed, GPS makes a similar contribution--tracking our movements through time and space: where we go, where we've been, the scope and scale of our daily movements,.. all comprising our identity in relation to space and place, through the tracking of our daily lives. Both have revolutionized our perceptions of our lives, and the costs of our living in terms of resources, for example, in relation to the spaces we occupy. Powerful and radical tools.