Geographic Information Science

Organizations that have a planning, research, management, operational, and/or regulatory responsibility at the local, county, state, or federal level are increasingly turning toward Geographic Information Science (GISc) technology as an approach to data organization, visualization, integration, synthesis, and modeling. GISc is an integrated set of tools, techniques, concepts, and data sets associated with a host of spatial digital technologies including Geographic Information Systems, Remote Sensing, Data Visualization, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), Spatial Analysis, Quantitative Methods, and Spatial Modeling.

GISc is routinely used in government agencies, corporations, environmental health and ecological consulting firms, planning organizations, and academic institutions. Together, and separately, GISc has gained prominence across the social, natural, and spatial sciences. As a rapidly growing computer technology, GISc supports many kinds of decision making and analyses, including environmental policy, marketing, planning, demographic analysis, resource management, ecological analyses, health care delivery, nutrition and diet, environment and health, epidemiology, and information technology. These spatial digital technologies offer the opportunity to gain fresh insights into the pattern of variables and the behavior of systems through, for example, the spatial, temporal, spectral, and radiometric resolutions of remote sensing systems that are capable of mapping a host of social and ecological landscapes; the analytical and data integration capability of Geographic Information Systems (GIS); the locational specificity afforded through GPS; the importance of data visualizations to characterize patterns and to relate scales of representation to processes influencing areal distributions recorded over space and through time; and the predictive power of quantitative models and the descriptive capacity of statistical relationships and spatial analyses.

GISc is a fundamental, spatial, and non-spatial informational framework and perspective used to understand the nature of geographic data and provide theoretical foundations for geo-spatial techniques. [Page 751]GISc evolved from the computerized, geographic information systems of the 1960s and 1970s. The increased demand and availability of spatial data and spatial data analysis, together with improved computer power and algorithms and software functionality have transformed a spatial analytical perspective characterized as a simple toolbox to an information system, and now to an integrated approach to science (i.e., GISc). Central to GISc is a suite of spatial digital technologies, best exemplified by GIS, Remote Sensing, and GPS.