A Geographic Information System (GIS) is an information system designed to work with data referenced by spatial or geographic coordinates.  GIS technology has proven to be invaluable in many areas of application including municipal and federal government operations, health care, business management, and the social and natural sciences.  It is a complex technology with many subtle nuances that requires considerable training, tools, and experience to fully exploit.

Visual analytics (VA) is the use of graphical, image and other pictographic techniques to display and navigate large sets of data for the purpose of discovering relationships among the data.  Analysts are quickly overwhelmed by large listings or tables of data.  Through visualization techniques, millions of data points can be summarized in displays such as dashboards, maps and diagrams.  Color, size, position, orientation and other features are used to represent characteristics of the data.  Specialized tools have been developed to highlight relationships and changes in relationships.  Anomalies are easily detectable.  Real time and varying data can be shown by animation.