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 is stored in maps or images. GIScience includes the existing technologies and research areas of GIS (geographic information systems, or [Page 1285]GISystems), cartography (mapmaking), geodesy (measurement of the Earth itself), surveying (measurement of natural and man-made features on the Earth, also called geomatics in the United States), photogrammetry (measurement from photographs or images), global positioning systems (GPS, precise and accurate positioning on the Earth's surface aided by satellites), digital image processing (the handling and analysis of image data), remote sensing (observation of Earth from ...