6. What are the advantages of GIS?

The Census 2001 website is a good example of how GIS can store and display a number of large datasets for the entire country quickly and easily. Before the Census was made available through a GIS, you would have had to search manually through records on your computer on telephone staff at the Census office to get information about your area of interest. With GIS, data for any area can be accessed quickly and easily according to a location. Multimap is able to store and show maps and aerial photographs covering the whole of the UK. Unless you had an enormous map library and knew exactly where every town and village in the UK was, you would be unable to provide the level of information that Multimap is able to do in just a few seconds. Greenwood County’s mapping system illustrates how GIS can provide access to a variety of detailed datasets quickly and how the display can be easily modified. Essentially, you are able to customise your data to suit your needs.