GIScience_all.pdf

GIScience
GIScience (geographic information science) is a scholarly discipline that addresses
fundamental issues surrounding the use of a variety of digital technologies to handle
geographic information; namely, information about places, activities, and phenomena on
and near the surface of the Earth that are stored in maps or images. GIScience includes
the existing technologies and research areas of GIS (geographic information systems or
GISystems), cartography (mapmaking), geodesy (measurement of the Earth itself),
surveying (measurement of natural and manmade features on the Earth; also called
geomatics in the U.S.), photogrammetry (measurement from photographs or images),
global positioning system or GPS (precise and accurate positioning on the Earth’s surface
aided by satellites), digital image processing (handling and analysis of image data),
remote sensing (observation of Earth from space or underwater), and quantitative spatial
analysis and modeling.
GIScience therefore includes questions of spatial data structures, analysis,
accuracy, meaning, cognition, visualization, and many more, and thus overlaps with the
domains of several traditional disciplines that are concerned with Earth’s physical
processes or how humans interaction with the Earth (e.g., geography, geology and
geophysics, oceanography, ecology, environmental science, applied mathematics, spatial
statistics, physics), as well as disciplines that are concerned with how humans interact
with machines (e.g., computer science, information science, cognitive science, cognitive
psychology, artificial intelligence). However, GIScience is not central to any of these,
representing instead a new kind of scientific collaborative that is defined by researchers
from many distinct backgrounds working together on particular sets of interrelated

problems; problems that are scientific in nature but also serve the needs of natural
resource management, government, industry, and business.
It is important to make a distinction between GIS and GIScience. While GIS is
concerned primarily with the hardware and software for capturing, manipulating, and
representing geographic data and information (e.g., GIS as a container of data, maps, and
software tools), GIScience is essentially the “science behind GIS” or the “science behind
the systems.” It can be defined further as the scientific research that is done both on and
with GIS, ranging from the fundamental issues arising from the use of GIS (such as how
to improve the interface to the system, to improve its overall design and usability, or to
track error through the system), to the systematic study of geographic information using
scientific methods (such as issues of scale, accuracy, and quantitative analysis of spatial
data), even to the science that is done with GIS (e.g., the development of spatial models
for predicting landslide susceptibility in a region, or of agent-based models for simulating
the actions or interactions vehicles in a transportation network, or of a map or table or
spatial statistic expressing environmental impacts resulting from the decision to
commercially develop a piece of land).
A Brief History of GIScience
The origin of GIScience is traced back to two keynote addresses presented by
Michael F. Goodchild of the University of California at Santa Barbara at conferences in
Europe: one entitled “Spatial Information Science” to the Fourth International
Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Zurich, Switzerland, July 1990 and the other,
“Progress on the GIS Research Agenda” to the Second European GIS Conference,

Brussels, Belgium, April 1991. In both of these keynote addresses Goodchild challenged
the academic GIS community to move beyond a focus primarily on the technical
capabilities of GIS to the more substantive intellectual challenges and scientific questions
posed by the use of GIS, or the impediments to its use. This fundamental shift would
thereby ensure the acceptance and longer-term survival of GIS within broader academia.
These important presentations were later published in 1992 in a seminal paper for the
International Journal of Geographic Information Systems, a paper that has since defined
the field of GIScience. A few years prior to Goodchild’s presentations in Europe, the
National Science Foundation (NSF) had in 1988 awarded a multi-year, multi-million
grant to University of California at Santa Barbara, the State University of New York at
Buffalo and the University of Maine to form the National Center for Geographic
Information and Analysis or NCGIA. This was the first major consortium of
academicians formed to define and conduct research in the field, laying the foundations
for current and future scholarly inquiry by way of its Initiatives 1-21 on topics ranging
from the accuracy of spatial databases, to visualization of spatial data quality, to the
social implications of GIS, to multiple roles of GIS in global change research, to
collaborative spatial decision-making. Following on the success of the NCGIA, but
seeking to realign its research, education, and outreach agendas on more basic,
fundamental issues of GIScience, the NCGIA spawned Project Varenius in 1997. Project
Varenius focused on several strategic areas of GIScience deemed among the most fruitful
for advancing the field in the new context of 21st
century information technology. These
strategic areas were cognitive models of geographic space, geographies of the
information society (including spatial data infrastructures), and computational

implementations of geographic concepts (including overcoming the duality of spatially-
continuous fields versus discrete objects). A series of Varenius specialist workshops was
held on these topics and publications produced from 1997 to 1999.
In a somewhat parallel effort, in 1990 the NCGIA board of directors
recommended that a more broadly based organization be established to engage the long-
term participation of excellent researchers beyond the three-university consortium of the
NCGIA, thereby supporting and promoting GIScience even further. The NCGIA
responded by forming an ad hoc committee of researchers from sixteen institutions with
prominent programs in GIS and representing seven different academic disciplines. These
individuals gathered sufficient momentum to spawn a national meeting in Boulder,
Colorado in 1994 attended by forty-two individuals representing thirty-three universities,
research institutions, and the Association of American Geographers. This meeting
established the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science or UCGIS as
a formal non-profit organization with a charge, as indicated at www.ucgis.org, “to
advance the understanding of geographic processes and spatial relationships through
improved theory, methods, technology and data, and to promote the informed and
responsible use of geographic information systems and geographic analysis for the
benefit of society.” The UCGIS has since grown to a membership of over eighty (at the
time of this writing, seventy-three universities, three professional organizations, and eight
corporate, government, and international members). The organization continues to seek
ways to unify the academic GIScience research and education communities to speak with
a strong voice on matters affecting resources and policies, particularly where the U.S.
Congress and federal agencies such as NSF, the National Aeronautics and Space

Administration (NASA), the U.S Geological Survey (USGS), the National Geospatial-
Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Federal Emergency Management Administration
(FEMA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are concerned. Over the years, the organization has
formulated dozens of research and education priorities in GIScience, disseminated these
via white papers, brochures, and occasional scholarly monographs, and assessed progress
in relation to major federal programs and national interests.
In Europe, a similar effort was launched to form the Association of Geographic
Information Laboratories for Europe or AGILE. AGILE was established in 1998 with
mission and goals similar to UCGIS, and with an eye toward continuing momentum from
the European GIS conference series, as well as new research initiatives developing within
the European Science Foundation’s GISDATA scientific program. AGILE promotes and
develops GIScience initiatives in a manner similar to UCGIS with working groups,
research initiatives, and small conferences and workshops for the exchange of ideas and
strategic planning on promoting GIScience initiatives.
GIScience as a field of study has now reached a mature level with its own
scholarly journals, research monographs, blogs, textbooks, core curricula, degree and
certificate programs, research institutes, professional organizations, and conferences. For
example, in addition to the UCGIS and AGILE, there are related organizations such as
the Cartography of Geographic Information Society, the Open Geospatial Consortium,
and the International Spatial Accuracy Research Association, leading peer-reviewed
journals such as the International Journal of Geographical Information Science
(published by Taylor & Francis) and Cartography and Geographic Information Science

(published by the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping), as well as
Transactions in GIS (published by Blackwell) and Geoinformatica (published by
Springer). The GIScience series of conferences (www.giscience.org) has convened
biennially since 2000, and several new conferences that have emerged in recent years
such as GeoWeb (www.geowebconference.org), the International Conference on
Geospatial Semantics and the Where 2.0 and OSCON conferences of O’Reilly Media
(conferences.oreillynet.com) now regularly feature GIScience themes and research
topics.
Examples of Research Topics in GIScience
Research in GIScience is now represented by literally scores of different topics
and specialties, all arising from the questions raised by GIS and the other kinds of
geographic technologies mentioned above. For example, there are questions of
representation. How to represent the varied and infinitely complex features on the surface
of the Earth? What criteria should be used to select a representation? How best to assess a
representation in terms of its accuracy, its completeness? How should one store a given
representation efficiently – what is the best data model to use conceptually and the best
data structure to use computationally? How should extend a representation from the well-
known two-dimensions of a flat surface to the three-, four- and n-dimensions needed to
capture and understand dynamic processes in the atmosphere, the ocean, and the Earth’s
surface?
There are research questions in the realm of scale, which refers to the level of
detail at which information can be observed, represented, and analyzed. How does

changing the scale of data affect our understanding of the processes or patterns
generating the data? Do processes always scale linearly or uniformly, and if not, how do
we characterize or understand them? What are the best ways to describe scaling
behavior? Should one use a fractal dimension or multifractals? Is there scale within the
digital world of the computer (i.e., does a cartographer’s representative scale for a paper
map really matter for data sets that may never exist in paper map form)?
Research questions abound in other areas such as spatial data acquisition and
integration, cognition of geographic information, interoperability of geographic
information, spatial information policy and privacy, error and uncertainty of spatial data
and analyses, and many more. Table 1 summarizes the many interesting areas that have
persisted in GIScience and as well as though now emerging. Most of these have been
identified and refined by the UCGIS over the course of their summer and winter
assemblies of the past decade. Of note once again is that these do not focus on geographic
technologies such as GIS, GPS, remote sensing, etc. but on several fundamental issues
raised by the technologies, especially those impeding its more effective use. The science
done with the technologies is motivated by the need for improved practice, observation,
or spatially-explicit problem solving.
TABLE 1 HERE.

Table 1. Examples of high-priority research topics of GIScience. Source: UCGIS,
AGILE, and GIScience 2008 (2008).
Long-term Research
Challenges
Spatial Ontologies Geographic Representation Spatial Data Acquisition
and Integration
Scale Spatial Cognition Space and Space/Time
Analysis and Modeling
Uncertainty in Geographic
Information
Geovisualization GIS and Society:
Interrelation, Integration,
and Transformation
Geographic Information
Engineering:
Distributed and Mobile
Computing
Engineering:
Spatial Information
Infrastructures
Engineering:
Geospatial Data Mining and
Knowledge Discovery
Short-term Research
Priorities
GIS and Decision Making Geospatial Web Service
Interoperability
Location-based Services
(including ethical and
privacy dimensions)
Identification of Spatial
Clusters
Geospatial Semantic Web
and Information Semantics
Resource Management
Emergency Data
Acquisition and Analysis
Gradation and
Indeterminate Boundaries
Security
Geospatial Data Fusion Institutional Aspects of
Spatial Data Infrastructures
Partnering
Geocomputation Global Representation and
Modeling
Spatialization
Pervasive, Ubiquitous
Computing and
Geoinformation
Geospatial
Cyberinfrastructure,
including Design of
Service-Oriented
Architecture (SOA)
Dynamic Modeling
Public Participation GIS Temporal GIS Geospatial Visual Analytics
Education in GIScience
As the adoption of GIS technology and the principles of GIScience have
continued to increase across academic, government and commercial sectors, there has

been an increasing emphasis on ensuring an adequately trained and educated workforce
in GIScience. Each year the demand by university students for courses not only in GIS
but also in GIScience has increased, as has the demand for this coursework by geospatial
professionals. Further, the advances in the technology and the research have spawned a
national demand for sequences of courses external to traditional degree programs, hence
the proliferation of certificates in GIS, in remote sensing, in surveying, and the like. In
the late 1990s it became the view of many professionals within the GIScience community
that the time had come to synthesize, articulate, and put into appropriate intellectual
context the recent advances of this research for use in the classroom at both the
undergraduate and graduate levels. As such, the UCGIS developed a set national
priorities to advance GIScience education. Among these was a focus on emerging
technologies for delivering GIScience education, including distance education (e.g., the
web, multimedia audio and video files, digital libraries, tele-immersion, digital video,
Internet2, and distributed classrooms connected by digital audio and video for two-
way interactive lecture sessions). Supporting infrastructure to support GIScience
instruction was a related priority, covering issues of facilities administration and staffing,
design and maintenance, safety and security of labs and classrooms, and financial
resources. Other priorities included access and equity issues (e.g., for students with
physical or learning impairments or from disadvantaged or disenfranchised groups of
society), alternative designs for curriculum content and evaluation, research-based
graduate GIScience education, and learning with GIS (emphasizing the use of both GIS
and GIScience to help students learn about other subjects such as environmental science).
Soon after developing its national education priorities the UCGIS embarked on an

ambitious project to develop visionary model curricula for GIScience, designed to further
aid in the development of an adequate supply of well–educated and well–prepared
GIScientists and technologists. Desired outcomes a model curricula included: (a)
demonstrated skill in integrative spatial thinking and effective implementation of various
spatial analysis methods, as well as collaborative learning across several sub-disciplines
within the GIScience field; (b) solid grounding in the appropriate application of related
geospatial technology (software, data collection instruments and devices); and (c)
familiarity with a wide variety of research applications, management and decision-
support scenarios, with the capacity to apply knowledge to scientific and management
problems at a variety of spatial and temporal scales.
Over an 8-year period (1998-2006), dozens of GIScience researchers and
educators participated in workshops and related activities in developing an initial
comprehensive inventory of knowledge and skills defining the field. The result was the
first edition of the GIScience & Technology Body of Knowledge resource book and
brochure, published in 2006 and detailing hundreds of topics, thousands of formal
educational objectives, all organized into over seventy units within ten major knowledge
areas.
The Body of Knowledge serves not only as a resource for course and curriculum
planning but also as a basis for professional certification, program accreditation, and
articulation agreements between four-year universities and two-year community colleges.
Issues of certification where GIScience is concerned, and to a lesser degree accreditation
and licensure, will be the subject of vigorous discussion and debate for the foreseeable
future. As yet there is still no authoritative body that accredits a GIScience major, minor,

or certificate program, as currently exists for engineering, urban planning, architecture,
and other professionally oriented programs (keeping in mind that accreditation refers to
programs in order to establish professional and ethical standards, whereas certification
refers to individuals). This differs still from licensure, which is meant to protect the
public from any harm that an incompetent professional may cause (as is the case with the
licensing of land surveyors for example). Organizations such as the Engineering
Accreditation Commission of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology,
accredit traditional disciplines such as civil engineering and forest engineering. But these
organizations are highly disciplinary in orientation and commonly review entire
departments or colleges, rather than components of them. The Urban and Regional
Information Systems Association (URISA) piloted a national program in 2003 to certify
GIS professionals via a new GIS Certification Institute (GISCI), including an ascription
to a GIS code of ethics. GISCI produced the first group of certified GIS professionals
(aka GISPs) in 2003 and has since certified over 2000 more by way of a non-
examination, portfolio-based system. GIScience coursework offered throughout the U.S.
is eligible toward this national certification. The American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing certifies a range of GIScience professionals (mapping scientists and
technologists in GIS/land information systems, remote sensing, and photogrammetry) via
a peer-reviewed application and written examination.
Dawn J. Wright
See also 3-D Data Models, Analytical Operations in GIS, Cartography, GIS
Design, Geocomputation, Michael Goodchild, History of GIS, Spatial Analysis, Spatial

Data Models
Further Readings
Association of Geographic Information Laboratories for Europe. [Online]. Retrieved
June 1, 2008, from http://www.agile-online.org
DiBiase, D. DeMers, M., Johnson, A., Kemp, K. Luck, A.T., Plewe, B. and E. L. Usery
(Eds.). (2006). Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of
Knowledge, 1st
edition. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers
and University Consortium for Geographic Information Science.
Goodchild, M.F. (1992). Geographic information science, International Journal
Geographical Information Systems, 6(1), 31–45.
Goodchild, M.F. (2006). Geographical information science: Fifteen years later. In P.F.
Fisher (Ed.) Classics from IJGIS: Twenty Years of the International Journal of
Geographical Information Science and Systems (pp. 199-204). London: Taylor &
Francis.
Goodchild, M.F. (2006). GIScience ten years after Ground Truth, Transactions in GIS,
10(5), 687–692.
Kemp, K. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Geographic Information Science. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications.
McMaster, R.E. & Usery, E.L. (Eds.). (2004). A Research Agenda for Geographic
Information Science. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis-CRC Press.
Wilson, J.P. & Fotheringham, A.S. (Eds.). (2007). The Handbook of Geographic
Information Science. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Wright, D.J., Goodchild, M.F., and Proctor, J.D. (1997). Demystifying the persistent
ambiguity of GIS as “tool” versus “science,” Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 87(2), 346-362.
University Consortium for Geographic Information Science [Online]. Retrieved June 1,
2008, from http://www.ucgis.org

GIScience_all.pdf

More Related Content

Similar to GIScience_all.pdf (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

GIScience_all.pdf