A brown bag focusing on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) will be held Wednesday, March 28, at noon, in Skillman 003. The presenter will be John R. Wilson of the Department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) enable us to analyze and display geospatially referenced information. Originally designed for mainframe computers, today’s GIS programs run on PCs. Now, with the advent of Google Earth and Microsoft TerraServer, anyone with Internet access can do simple GIS mapping.

Full GIS software, with its host of versatile and powerful tools, has been used for years in the sciences and social sciences to map features (geology, transportation, urbanization) and data (census, socio-economic data, health statistics). John Wilson will provide a background on GIS and show many of its current and potential uses across the disciplines at Lafayette.

Lunch will be provided.