Texas A&M kicks off GIS Day on Monday, an annual event celebrating geospatial data and its ability to transform, change and connect lives all over the world. Texas A&M has transformed this day-long event into three days-making it one of the largest GIS Days in the world.
Andrew Klein, professor in the department of geography, is one of the many professors and scholars hosting GIS Day workshops and programs. Although GIS Day is actually Wednesday, Klein said Texas A&M has had so many activities in the past two years that GIS Day had to be extended.
“I think the size of our GIS Day indicates how extensively used GIS is across a Land- and Space- and Sea-Grant University such as ours,” Klein said.
GIS, Geographic Information Systems, is one of the three core geospatial technologies. The other two are GPS, Global Positioning Systems, and Remote Sensing.
“Working together, these three technologies enable people to know where they are precisely on earth [through] GNSS, have a bird’s eye perspective on the world [through] Remote Sensing and be able to create, store and analyze large amounts of spatial information to solve problems [through] GIS,” Klein said.
Klein has taught GIS on campus for more than 15 years. He said it is gratifying to have former students come back and participate in GIS Day and hear about their success and how they have used GIS in their work to solve important problems. Klein said it is one of the things that makes teaching Aggies so rewarding.
“I think our GIS Day efforts are just one way of highlighting how our university is striving to be the leader in geospatial technologies in Texas and that we are working hard to partner with industry in order to produce high quality students that can go out and become GIS leaders in industry and government,” Klein said.