The paper is divided into three parts. The first part reviews GIS technologies as essential background to the remainder of the paper. The second part of the paper aims to show the impact and potential of employing GIS technologies in survey processing and, in particular, in survey design. We show how, by employing a GIS-assisted computer-intensive sampling strategy, it is possible to substantially reduce the costs of surveys based on area sampling whilst maintaining the same level of accuracy. The third part of the paper aims at increasing awareness among GIS users of distortion effects induced on statistical analysis by the error propagation which occurs when GIS operations are based on two or more maps that individually contain errors. The paper considers the error properties of output maps in such circumstances.