GPS tracker becomes more a part of our daily lives

GPS is such an extremely important technology! It is no exaggeration to say that GPS is revolutionizing aspects of many fields, including surveying (slashing the costs of many kinds of survey efforts and bringing surveying to parts of the world where surveys are nonexistent, highly inaccurate, or long since outdated), the natural resource fields (providing rapid and far more accurate collection of field natural resource data of many kinds), and municipal planning (providing for the updating of all kinds of records based on accurate field checking), to name only a few. electronic tracking device is making practical the kinds of data collection which were simply out of the question only a few years ago because the necessary skilled teams of field personnel were unavailable and the costs of accurate field data collection were beyond the means of virtually all organizations which needed these kinds of data. 

GPS is changing all that. Use of the kinds of methods taught in The Global Positioning System and GIS is spreading very rapidly; electronic tracking devices use will become commonplace throughout dozens of fields in just the next few years as costs of hardware and software continue to fall and books like this one increase the number of persons familiar with these two coupled technologies. The impact of this revolution in data gathering will, I believe, have pro-found effects on the way in which we view the earth, on ways in which we exercise our stewardship of its resources for those who come after us, and on the professional practice of an extraordinary range of disciplines (engineering, oceanography, geology, urban planning, archaeology, agriculture, range management, environmental protection, and many, many others). I look forward to the time when tens of millions of people will make use of GPS technology every day, for thousands of purposes.

As the use of GPS technology becomes more a part of our daily lives, from timing the Internet to proving position within mobile phones and location information for a range of location based services, the need for professionals skilled at collecting and maintaining spatial data bases can only increase.  most any level of detail. While GPS is also an extremely complex system, using it for navigation is simple by comparison. It allows you to know where you are by consulting a radio receiver. The accuracies range from as good as a few millimeters to somewhere around 15 meters, depending on equipment and procedures applied to the process of data collection. More advanced GPS Tracking Device can also record location data for transfer to computer memory, so GPS can not only tell you where you are–but also tell you where you were. Thus, GPS can serve as means of data input for GISs. This subject is not quite a simple as using GPS for navigation. 

Traditionally (if one can use that word for such a new and fast moving technology), GISs got their data from maps and aerial photos. These were either scanned by some automated means or, more usually, digitized manually using a handheld “puck” to trace map features–the map being placed on an electronic drafting board called a “digitizer.” With GPS, the earth’s surface becomes the digitizer board; the GPS receiver antenna becomes the puck. This approach inverts the entire traditional process of GIS data collection: spatial data come directly from the environment and the map becomes a document of output rather than input.