Open GIS / Открытые ГИС

When computers were frst invented in the middle of the last century, nobody ever anticipated that the instruction sets to program them would ultimately evolve to the point where many of them could be accessed freely, without charge, in ways that would become widely available to nonexpert communities. Nor did we ever consider that computers would penetrate every corner of social life, revolutionizing our social behavior, our science, and our politics. The massive dissemination of information technologies that has taken place and shows little sign of stopping could not have occurred without dramatic expansion of computer power, without what is now known as “Moore’s Law” which postulates that the speed of a basic computer processor—a computer on a chip—doubles in speed and in memory every 18 months. Computers are thus becoming ever smaller physically and are being embedded into fner and fner scale devices, physical of course, but increasingly biological. <...>