The Future of GIS

Catholicgauze stirs the pot with an essay on the future of GIS and its increasing separation from Geography. Key graf:

With [Geographic Information Science] focusing only on GIS the whole reason GIS exists, to study spatial phenomenon, is kicked out the door. When GIS is the pinacle of everything geography loses. What is happening is that many GIS users have no knowledge of geography. With a few clicks of a button a GIS jockey can describe data’s distribution but cannot explain why things are the way they are. A monkey can do that work.

I don’t have a dog in this race — I have no ties to either academe or the GIS industry — but would like to know your take. (Time to test the comments!)

Posted on Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 11:03 AM
Categories: GIS

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Comments

There is no such thing as GIS just for the sake of GIS.

GIS is merely a tool in support of other domains and pursuits. GIS supports planning and land use, it supports archaeology, environmental science, geology, human and physical geography, commerce, transportation, and so many, many more disciplines - essentially anything that has a spatial component. The core drivers have been, and will continue to be these pieces of business logic.

On the other side of the coin, the computer scientists, database specialists, and others supporting GIS work in a partnership, to develop the complex relational schemas, the algorithms, and implementations of these real-world processes within the digital domain - and in many ways, serve to reduce the complex technical to simpler, more accessible approaches for use by the disciplines, and for the layman alike.

Indeed, there are many potential pitfalls… all must work together in orchestration.

[TypeKey Profile Page] Dave Smith | 03/12/2007 at 8:01 AM | #

I disagree. GIScience doesn’t exist solely to support other disciplines any more than Statistical Science exists solely to support other disciplines. It has its own sets of problems and underlying theories that are independent of computer applications, geography, or computer science. Michael Goodchild has written quite a bit on this, and I believe quite convincingly. An example may be found at http://www.csiss.org/aboutus/presentations/files/goodchild_ucgis_jun03.pdf. As an example, nobody questions that mathematics has an applications branch and a theoretical branch. Do calculators, MatLab, and Mathematica make these mathematicians number monkeys? Why cannot GIScience have similar theoretical and applied branches?

[TypeKey Profile Page] P Riggs | 03/13/2007 at 11:29 AM | #

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