Topic:

Presenter:

Richard E. Hoskins, PhD MPH
GIS and Spatial Epidemiology Group
Washington State Department of Health
Olympia, Washington

GIS (geographic information system) refers to doing analytical work with maps. Not just numbers. A Geographic information system certainly has a lot to do with mapping and maps, but it's more than that. It is a way to organize information in terms of what's called a "spatial entity." This means that we are going to focus our look at epidemiologic data on "where" as well as "when" and "what."

That geographic component can be longitude or latitude; it can be a line like a road. It can be a polygon, like a country, census track or a point like the location of a cholera case. It is an instrument of exploratory data analysis and descriptive epidemiology. Lately it's becoming a part of analytical epidemiology.

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