GIS

Geography is fundamentally about building shared understandings of the world within and beyond its disciplinary boundaries and within and beyond the world of academia. Within academe, shared understanding is core to a dynamic and coherent discipline that is focused on robust, transparent, and (above all) usable representations of the real world. Beyond academe, geographic knowledge should not be the preserve of just the few, and a core mission of geography as a discipline is to reach out to other disciplines to provide a generalized understanding of space and spatiality—not least to provide a forum in which diverse views[Page 190] might be reconciled. In either setting, spatial representations should be accessible to the widest possible constituency in society. Much of human geography pays lip service to the need to acknowledge difference. At their best, geographic information systems (GIS) are not only accessible but also transparent and readily intelligible and so provide the only widely recognized formal spatial framework in the discipline for reconciling differences.

GIS are an applied problem-solving technology that allows us to create and share generalized representations of the world. Through real-world applications at geographic scales of measurement (i.e., from the architectural to the global), GIS can provide spatial representations that tell us the defining characteristics of large spaces and large numbers of individuals and are usable to a wide range of end users. They allow geography to address significant problems of society and the environment using explicitly spatial data, information, evidence, and knowledge. They not only tell us about how the world looks but also, through assembly of diverse sources of information, can lead us toward a generalized and explicitly geographic understanding of how the world works. As such, they lie at the heart of geography as a discipline, are pivotal to its ability to contribute to current real-world issues, and are core to its transferable skills base.

Beyond geography, the spatial dimension is viewed as inherently important by researchers and problem solvers working in a wide range of other academic and professional disciplines. In the world of business and commerce, for example, recent estimates suggest that global annual sales of GIS facilities and services may exceed $9 billion and are growing at a rate of 10% annually. The applications of GIS and their associated spatial data to which these figures relate range from local and national government departments; through banking, insurance, telecommunications, utility, and retail industries; to charities and voluntary organizations. In short, an enormous swathe of human activity is now touched, in some form or another, by this explicitly geographic technology and is increasingly reliant on it.

This line of thought illustrates the impact and significance that an inherently geographic endeavor is having on wider society and undoubtedly raises the external profile of geography as an academic discipline. Of course, a high level of economic activity does not necessarily equate with an increased likelihood of identifying scientific truth. Moreover, GIS-based representations of how the world works often suggest how capital, human, and physical resources should be managed or how the will of the individual should be subjugated to the public good. This can raise important ethical, philosophical, and political questions in human geography such as questions of access to, and ownership of, information and the power relations that characterize different interest groups in civil society. Such general concerns about the use of technology should be used to inform issues of ethics and accountability, but they do not call into question their raison d'être or (in the case of GIS) their centrality to geography as a discipline.

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