By Roger Tomlinson This article has been paraphrased from Roger
Tomlinson and M. A. G. Toomey, "GIS and LIS in Canada," chapter
15 in Mapping a Northern Land: The Survey of Canada 1947–1994,
Gerald McGrath and Louis Sebert, eds. (McGill-Queen's University
Press, 1999). At the heart of the innovations that led to the
Canada Geographic Information System was the fundamental idea of
using computers to ask questions of maps and to render useful
information from them. To do this, maps had to be in digital
form. This led to the idea that many digital maps could be
stitched together to represent the whole of Canada and that the
maps could be linked intelligently to digital databases of
statistics, such as the Census. Fifty years later, this brief
article recalls the people, organizations, and circumstances
that gave rise to these original ideas, and how the ideas played
out. In 1960, Spartan Air Services of Ottawa, Canada, was a
large surveying and mapping company whose business included
topographic mapping, geophys