  GIS originated in sparsely-populated Canada which, until the 1950s, at both the federal and provincial governmental levels, viewed land and other resources as unlimited. The late but inevitable realization that this was not the case led the Canadian federal government to initiate a national inventory of land and other natural resources. The purpose of what was christened as the “Canadian Geographical Information System” in 1963-64 was to analyze data collected by the Canada Land Inventory (CLI) to produce statistics that could be used to develop land management plans for effective resource utilization in large areas of rural  Canada.[95]  The CLI produced seven maps classifying  land.[96]  Constructing the CGIS meant developing techniques for the rapid handling and analysis of these maps and the data on which they were based. Today's commercial packages GIS parasitize key conceptual and technical innovations of the CGIS. At the technical level, when the CGIS project was initiated, there was no prior experience on how to structure geographical data internally (within the computer); there were no techniques for the overlay of maps or for calculating area. An experimental scanner to scan map data had yet to be built.