Development of Geographic Information Systems as an Information Technology

The phenomenon of informatization of society is quite well covered in the scientific and philosophical literature. At the same time, less attention is paid to the analysis of the development of the tool for informatization of society — information technology. One of the urgent problems of studying information technologies is to determine the stages of their development. Applying a historical approach to the study of information technologies (IT) and their branches — geoinformation technologies (GIT) — it is possible to establish the patterns of their development and determine the directions for further growth. In the process of studying the formation and improvement of IT and GIT, approaches to dividing the history of the development of these technologies into stages are determined. For the first approach, the determining factor in the transition to the next stage of development is the improvement of information processing tools. Within the framework of this approach, four main stages are distinguished - “elementary”, “mechanical”, “software” and “network”. The second approach is related to the evolution of the tasks solved by IT and GIT — the transition from formalized to partially formalized and non-formalized issues is considered. The third approach is based on the analysis of IT development and GIT as innovative technologies that successively go through the stages of invention, diffusion and adaptation. In the process of analyzing the history of IT, it was found that after the middle of the 20th century, GIT was singled out as one of the means of solving partially formalized and non-formalized tasks, which led to the beginning of the “explicit” development of GIT as an independent direction of IT.