Bachelor of Arts in Geographic Information Science University of Regina, Canada

The Bachelor of Geographic Information Science (B.GISc) is an innovative program offered by the Department of Geography & Environmental Studies at the University of Regina. The Bachelor of Geographic Information Science is a unique designation that is not offered in this format anywhere else in North America.

Geographic Information Science (GIScience) is the intellectual understanding behind the development and application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS are used by resource exploration companies to locate areas of new reserves, power utilities to plan new power line routes, municipalities to manage their infrastructure, school boards to optimize school bus routing, health districts to examine the spread of infectious diseases, police departments to identify crime hot spots, and businesses to document the geographic distribution and demographics of their customers.

Some of the questions asked in GIScience are:

• What are the implications of using latitude and longitude, a postal code, or a street address to locate a crime scene?
• How do you encode the flight pattern of a butterfly in a computer?
• Is there a spatial correlation between diabetes and socio-economic status?

GIScience is an emerging academic discipline and is being used throughout the world to solve problems in multiple disciplines:

• Biologists use GIS to map the nesting and foraging habitats of endangered wildlife. Environmental engineers have built hydraulic models into GIS to forecast peak river flow conditions.
• Crime mapping with GIS has revolutionized the work done by justice and police professionals.
• Social planners and social workers use GIS to optimize the delivery of social services to segments of the population in most need.
• Business analysts enter data on customer purchasing patterns, demographic trends, and the location of competitors into a GIS to identify ideal locations to establish new business enterprises.
• Health professionals use GIS to track the spread of infectious diseases and to search for the social and environmental conduits along which the viruses travel the fastest.