In order to cover such a wide range of topics, this Guide has been divided into a number of main sections or chapters. These are then further subdivided, in part to identify distinct topics as closely as possible, facilitating the creation of a web site from the text of the Guide. Hyperlinks embedded within the document enable users of the web version of this document to navigate around the Guide and to external sources of information, data, software, and reading materials.

Chapter 2 provides an introduction to spatial thinking, recently described by some as “spatial literacy”, and addresses the central issues and problems associated with spatial data that need to be considered in any analytical exercise. This is followed in Chapter 3 by an examination of the historical and methodological background to GIS and spatial analysis. Subsequent chapters present the various analytical methods supported within widely available software tools. The majority of the methods described are implemented as standard facilities in modern commercial GIS packages such as ArcGIS, MapInfo, Manifold, TNTMips and Geomedia. Many are also provided in more specialised GIS products such as Idrisi, GRASS, Terraseer and ENVI. In addition we discuss a number of more specialised tools, designed to address the needs of specific sectors or technical problems that are otherwise not well-supported within the core GIS packages at present.

Throughout this Guide examples are drawn from and refer to specific products — these have been selected purely as examples and are not intended as recommendations. Extensive use has also been made of tabulated information, providing abbreviated summaries of techniques and formulas for reasons of both compactness and coverage. These tables are designed to provide a quick reference to the various topics covered and are, therefore, not intended as a substitute for fuller details on the various items covered.

This Guide does not currently cover advanced spatial statistics, spatial econometrics and spatio-temporal methods and models. Many of these topics tend to be more specialised, often having been developed for particular sector requirements, such as health research, socio-economic analysis or criminology. As such many of the tools described are not available in GIS packages, but are provided in more specialised software with limited map display capabilities and input/output of commonly used vector and raster spatial data formats. Increasingly, however, spatial statistics toolsets with a large prospective user base are beginning to appear in the mainstream commercial GIS products.

Just as all datasets and software packages contain errors, known and unknown, so too do all books and websites, and the authors of this Guide expect that there will be errors despite our best efforts to remove these! Some may be genuine errors or misprints, whilst others may reflect our use of specific versions of software packages and their documentation. Inevitably with respect to the latter, new versions of the packages that we have used to illustrate this Guide will have appeared even before publication, so specific examples, illustrations and comments on scope or restrictions may have been superseded. In all cases the user should review the documentation provided with the software version they plan to use, check release notes for changes and known bugs, and look at any relevant online services (e.g. user/developer forums on the web) for additional materials and insights.