What Are Geographic Analysis Tools?

Geographic analysis tools are software or techniques used to examine and interpret spatial data to understand patterns, relationships, and trends in geographical information. One of the best reasons to use a Geographic Information System (GIS) is to perform geographic computations that help you in your work. Geographic analysis tools can perform a variety of analyses that can unearth geographic patterns in your data. Some examples of geographic analysis tools are:

• Buffer tools can show the areas within a certain distance of a location and estimate their demographics
• Territory tools let you group areas and compute attributes for the completed territory
• Area of influence tools allow you to visualize the straight-line and drive-time catchment areas for a set of locations
• Facility location tools determine the best candidate sites from a set of candidate locations
• Density tools let you visualize point data on a regular grid
• Overlay tools calculate the attributes of map features based on features in another layer
• Weighted center tools find the geographic center of a set of points weighted by some attribute of the points
• Drive-time ring tools determine the area that can be reached within a certain time from one or more locations
• Clustering tools automatically group points or areas into compact clusters
• Routing tools optimize routes for deliveries and pickups