andscience. By the beginning of the 1990s,
however, there was a sense among academic
researchers that GIS had forged new intellec-
tual territory. The term ‘GIScience’ was first
used in a keynote speech given by Michael
Goodchild during the July, 1990 Spatial Data
Handling conference in Zurich. Goodchild
noted that the GIS community is driven by
intellectual curiosity about the representa-
tional and analytical capacity of Geographic
Information Systems. He argued that GIS
researchers should focus on fundamental pre-
cepts that underlie the technology rather than
the application of existing technology. Fur-
thermore, he argued that there are unique
characteristics of spatial data, and problems
associated with their analysis, that differentiate
GIS from other information systems. These
properties include: the need to develop con-
ceptualmodelsofspace; the sphericity of spa-
tial data (based on the shape of the Earth);
problems with spatial data capture; spatial
data uncertainty and error propagation; as
well as algorithms and spatial data display.
Given the distinctiveness of geographical
data analysis and a growing community of
researchers dedicated to solving technical and
theoretical problems associated with GIS,
Goodchild argued that ‘GIS as a field con-
tain[s] a legitimate set of scientific questions’.
Goodchild’s keynote address was followed by
a summary article in theInternational Journal
of GIS(IJGIS) in 1992. This oft-cited article
(Abler, 1993b; Dobson, 1993), was a beach-
head for the very successful effort to change
the meaning of the ‘S’ word in GIS (Good-
child, 1992).
The GIScience acronym subsequently gar-
nered widespread support in most parts of the
discipline. The name shift is manifest in other
areas of geography.Progress in Physical Geog-
raphyroutinely presents updates on GIScience
rather than GISystems (Atkinson, 1997). The
flagship journal IJGIS was renamed Inter-
national Journal of Geographical Information
Science in January 1997; its editor, Peter
Fisher, stressed that IJGIS had, in ten years
of publication, predominantly reflected the
development of theoretical bases that under-
pin subsequent systems: the science on which
subsequent systems are based. Fisher turned
to the (shorter)Oxford English Dictionaryto
support this distinction, noting thatsystems
are a collection of related objects or an assem-
blage while science is defined as knowledge
obtain through investigation. He noted that
the International Geographical Union (IGU)
had developed a working group for Geograph-
ical InformationSciencein 1996, the implica-
tion being that there is broad institutional
support for this designation (Fisher, 1997).
Marc Armstrong, the former North American
editor of IJGIS, recalls that identifying aspects
of GIS as science was an acknowledgement
that many GIS researchers were neither using
nor developing ‘systems’, but were doing basic
theoretical work that involved the ‘system-
atization’ of knowledge (Armstrong, pers.
comm.). Despite a call for recognition of the
scientific value of GIS, on the part of the aca-
demic community, the technology is indisput-
ably social in its construction, especially at the
software level.
Questions about the underlying assump-
tions written into the code that comprises
GISystems are the basis of GIScience. GIS-
cientists might legitimately question, for
example, the premises of embedded algorith-
mic models. A hydrological model, for in-
stance, might be outdated and fail to reflect
current understanding of flow processes.
Queries about the assumptions of the model
creators, their efficacy in multiple environ-
ments, and whether they are designed for use
withvector(polygon) orraster(gridded)
data all fall in the realm of GIScience. These
types of questions strike at the efficiency and
legitimacy of current Geographic Information
Systemsalgorithms; their resolution is the
basis for increase in the reliability of GIS for
the average user. Such questions do not repre-
sent the entirety of GIScience, however.
Every stage of GISystems, from spatial data
collection and input, to storage, analysis and,
finally, output ofmaps, is based on the trans-
lation of spatial phenomena into digital terms.
At each step of GIS, data are manipulated for
use in a digital environment, and these, often
subtle, changes have profound effects on the
results of analysis. Each of these transform-
ations involves a subtle shift in the representa-
tion of spatial entities, and accounting for
these modifications and their implications is
an important part of GIScience. Physical and
social information about the world, once in
digital form, is often manipulated and ana-
lysedin order tocorrespond to the researcher’s
interpretation of the world. Thus it is of
fundamental importance that GIScience de-
velop methods to monitor and account for
the effects that possible transformations have
on final representation. Finally, GIScience
researchers are charged with developing
methods of presenting analysis results such
that their visual display is consistent with
databaseresults.Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_G Final Proof page 278 2.4.2009 6:30pmGEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SCIENCE (GISC)