Implementing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Spreadsheet Models: What, Why, and How Jeffrey Keisler UMass, Boston Jeff.Keisler@umb.edu Roger Blake UMass, Boston Roger.Blake@umb.edu Janet Wagner Stockton College Janet.Wagner@stockton.edu Abstract Geographic Information Systems (GIS), computer- based systems that allow decision makers to incorporate geographically based data into their analyses, are widespread and powerful tools in many business and scientific settings today. In this paper, we discuss ways in which GIS functionality can be implemented within the spreadsheet environment. We show the straightforward and natural analogy between several GIS functions with spreadsheet functions, particularly for raster based data. We present two realistic examples meshing analytical models with GIS methods --- an integration which is greatly enhanced by the remarkable development platform provided by spreadsheets. We discuss the many benefits of the spreadsheet enabled seamless integration of geographical data, mathematical analysis, and mapping displays. 1. Introduction Geographic Information Systems (GIS), computer- based systems that allow decision makers to incorporate geographically based data into their analyses, are widespread and powerful tools in many business and scientific settings today. Geographic information systems --- broadly defined as systems that can store, retrieve, map, and analyze geographic data -- have grown dramatically in the past decade, helped in large part by the advent of affordable applications for the desktop. The field has also benefited from the increased availability of free and low cost data distributed easily on the internet. GIS have spread from their traditional domains of military applications, utility management, environmental and resource management to fields such as marketing (Sohovich [1]), insurance and real estate assessment (see Longley & Clarke [2]), PDA applications for fieldwork, and even human rights work (O Sullivan [3]). Many, if not most, U.S. and Canadian government agencies as well as states in the U.S. now have GIS departments and publicly available GIS data on the web. Organizations are making use of exciting new interactive web-based packages that allow for easy deployment of maps and spatial data. However, there is still a need to expand the use of GIS within organizations, particularly corporations, and to allow for more interaction between GIS experts and other departments. The idea that will be explored in this paper is that Figure 1. Raster maps implemented in a spreadsheet Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2009 1 978-0-7695-3450-3/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE