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 space or under water), 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 and how humans interact 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 fields, 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 not only 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., 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 (e.g., how to improve the interface to the system, improve its overall design and usability, or track error through the system) to the systematic study of geographic information using scientific methods (i.e., methods based on issues of scale, accuracy, and quantitative analysis of spatial data) and even to the science that is done with GIS (e.g., the development of spatial models for predicting landslide susceptibility in a region, agent-based models for simulating the actions or interactions of vehicles in a transportation network, or a map, table, or spatial statistic expressing the environmental impacts resulting from the decision to commercially develop a piece of land).