GIScience and Systems

Geographic information systems (GIS) support virtually any operation on geographic information: acquisition, editing, manipulation, analysis, modeling, visualization, publication, and storage. Geographic information science (GIScience) addresses the fundamental questions posed by GIS, constitutes the body of knowledge exploited by GIS, and the research that will enable the next generation of GIS. The history of GIS development has been dominated by a series of applications, and today virtually any activity concerned with the Earth's surface or near-surface has made use of GIS. GIS views the geographic domain through a particular lens, partitioning variation into a set of layers, and organizing space either as an array of cells or as a collection of point, line, or area features. Concepts of object orientation have been adopted within the past decade, allowing GIS to move significantly beyond the metaphor of the map and to include representations of phenomena that are complex and dynamic. Much effort has been expended in the past decade on exploiting the power of the Internet to support sharing of geographic information, and the geoportal represents the most recent stage in those developments. Various efforts have been made to identify the research agenda of GIScience, and a consensus has emerged as to its most important elements.