A moment to discuss GIS and how it is used...
How does this map distort the data?

“Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it is essential.” Mark Monmonier, 1991

All maps distort the world in some ways: they make it look flat and tiny, and they take away almost all of the stuff that you see when you look at the real world. Similarly, all representations of data (graphs, tables, charts) distort the things they represent, in order to make it easy to see some mathematical relationship. This page describes some of the decisions we made for displaying data in the maps, to help you understand the distortions we chose, and use the data appropriately.

For example, the town zoning map clearly indicates areas of business concentration, but not levels of concentration, another way to indicate business concentration would be to use color to show, one or all of the following variables: Number of Employees, Avg. Number of Customers (vehicles), for example. Can you think of an example where the two examples above would be very different in their representation of the facts? How would a Salon compare to a Accountants Office?

Geographic Information systems are important to everyone, from the ubiquitous GPS unit in your hand, to the vastly important field of Emergency Management - can you imagine the difficulty of understanding and finding all the victims of the Tsunami of 2011 in Japan if authorities didn't have a clear picture of what was before hand? We can't avoid the troubles that mother nature gives us, but we can be better prepared, GIS is key to that preparedness.