What is the difference between GIS and paper maps? Are paper maps also GIS?

Answer 1

Fundamentally, Geographic Information Systems are merely a tool. A very powerful tool, but a tool nonetheless. You can use Geographic Information Systems to do many things, including creating maps.

A map, at its core, is a physical (paper), digital (think Google Maps), or otherwise representation of the world around us, and can provide the user with whatever information the map-maker chooses, while a Geographic Information System is a tool that allows the user to create, manipulate or modify, and present spatial data. It is built off of a spatially enabled database. This database stores spatial information (Geometry Type, Coordinates, Coordinate Systems, Spatial References, etc.) and may or may not contain additional information in tabular format, known as attributes. Using this data, one can do many things, such as perform analyses, make predictions, or create visualizations.