Critical GIS pedagogies beyond ‘Week 10: Ethics’

Over two decades after the scholarly interventions that coalesced into ‘critical GIS’ as a field within GIScience, critical GIS remains underdeveloped in conversations on teaching and learning. The literature on GIScience education has emphasized content more than pedagogies – what to teach versus how to teach to move students toward particular learning objectives. This emphasis is reflected in dominant curricular approaches to critical GIS, in which questions around the complicated origins and complicit social, political, and economic relationships of GIS are taken up as discrete topics, tacked onto instruction that otherwise prioritizes technical dimensions of GIScience. We argue that GIScience coursework must resist such modularization by approaching critical GIS not as a set of topics, but an orientation to GIS praxis that ‘does’ GIS from within a questioning stance, to ask how we know. We outline specific curricular shifts and teaching practices we have used to foster this orientation in GIS students, offering ways of continually engaging students in practicing this orientation as they learn strong technical GIScience content. Finally, we trace the successes, challenges, and tensions sparked by these critical GIS pedagogies, drawing on student evaluation comments from our courses and reflecting on broader implications for GIScience instructors and geography faculty.     

GIS,Cartography, and the “Third Culture”: Geographic Imaginations in the Computer Age*

Geographic information systems (GIS) and cartography have traditionally been regarded as fields for the study of techniques. Yet the past ten years have witnessed geographers' increasing intellectual engagement with GIS and cartography. This essay recaps the recent intellectual discourses on GIS and cartography and speculates on possible development in the near future. Geocomputation, spatially integrated social sciences, social informatics, information ecology, and humanistic GIScience are identified as five areas of intensive new research, and it is argued that creative imaginations under the milieu of the “third culture” are urgently needed to address the challenging issues in this new technological era. Whether geography will become an intellectually more vibrant discipline hinges on the extent to which we can rekindle geographic imaginations in this computer age via GIScience to address issues of great societal concern.     

The world,the computer,and the mind: how Andrew Frank helped make human language and cognition cornerstones of geographic information science

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, cognitive science was included as one of the key disciplines in the emerging multidisciplinary field of geographic information science (GIScience). One of the key proponents and popularizers of the study of human cognition as part of GIScience – and one of its major researchers – has been Andrew U. Frank. In this essay, we review the history of Andrew Frank’s role as an innovator and champion for cognitive GIScience, and summarize some of his research contributions in this domain. Taken along with his contributions to other areas of GIScience, this review shows that Andrew Frank has been one of the primary figures in modern GIScience, and among its very broadest and intellectually-diverse contributors.     

GIS research to address tensions in geography

The rise of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies has been producing powerful tools for spatial data processing, management, analysis, modeling, and visualization. While supporting many tasks, GIS technologies have evoked new thinking and advanced intellectual inquiries in geography. Technological advances in other fields often stimulate new research questions and lead to revolutionary discoveries. The Hubble telescope revolutionizes our understanding of the universe, and 3D digital microscopes transform our knowledge of the coordination among biological, neurological, and physiological systems in living organisms. Can GIS claim similar revolutionary effects on geography? The answer is much up for debate. With GIS technologies, geographic studies can explore a broader extent across multiple scales in space and time and tackle problems through increasingly complex spatial statistics, visual analytics, computation, simulation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Both the Hubble telescope and 3D digital microscope were built based on scientific research that subserves the technological advances for inquiries into space and life systems. Likewise, GIScience research innovates GIS methods that enable novel geographic investigations and therefore contribute to geographic knowledge production. For the sake of simplicity, the term GIS used here represents both GIScience and GIS technologies. This essay attempts to clarify the intellectual contributions of GIS to geography on the following two questions: (1) What novel geographic thinking is driven by GIS? (2) How may GIS provoke new geographic inquiries and knowledge? Building on Nystuen's notion of four tensions that trigger geographic questions, the essay discusses how GIS innovations mediate historical tension, space‐time tension, dimensional tension and scale tensions.     

地理计算及其前沿问题

地理计算是地理信息科学的核心内容之一, 主要研究地理信息科学的方法学问题, 内容 包括建模、算法、计算体系和一般方法学问题。本文介绍了地理计算的五个前沿问题: (1)地学数据 挖掘从地理学问题出发, 对各种数据作地理学的模型处理和结果计算以发现地理知识; (2)空间运 筹在地理学中的应用日益广泛, 它的算法更加简单严密、精度也更高; (3)多自主体系统模拟已经 成为地理学科学研究中除归纳和演绎之外的第三种重要研究方法; (4) 离散空间的定性计算是进 行地理空间计算的必要基础; (5)本体论的发展是地理信息科学乃至整个地理学发展的需要。     

融合式研究趋势下的地理信息教学体系探索

城市研究的范式在大数据和人工智能的影响下已经发生了巨大变化。本文根据城市研究及地理信息科学的发展历程和学科脉络,提出城市空间信息学是社会和产业需求导向的一个新兴知识领域,也是融合式研究趋势下地理信息教学和研究的一个发展方向。城市规划和地理信息科学两大类专业虽然具备孵化出城市空间信息学人才的学科基础,但是其学科体系都需要较大的改变才能实现突破;从现有的学科设置的体系看,地理空间信息工程专业由于提供了同时培养学生系统思维、空间思维和计算思维的框架,具备发展城市空间信息学本科教育的入口。本文在此基础上提出了城市空间信息工程本科专业的培养方案设计思路,期望能够对城市空间信息学的学科发展以及教学研究带来讨论契机,并推动地理信息学科和城市规划学科的可持续发展。     

Integrated Approaches,Multiple Scales: Snag Dynamics in Burned Versus Unburned Landscapes*

By studying landscape form and patterns, we can study processes at multiple scales and determine how collectively those processes inform us about function(s). Integrating landscape ecology from a biogeographical perspective with geographic information science (GIScience) practices offers new ways to study how landscapes change over time and space, including how they can be measured, analyzed, and modeled for management needs. This article presents methodologies and selected results of analyzing spatial patterns from field data across multiple scales by examining standing dead tree (snag) processes across wildfire‐disturbed landscapes in Arizona. Our primary motivation was to illustrate a particular type of work benefiting from the coalescing of landscape ecology and GIScience, functioning at the methodological and practical overlap of these two contributing fields. Our management goals were to (1) describe spatial patterns and characteristics of snags in pairs of burned and unburned ponderosa pine forests of Arizona in four recent (within the past ten years) wildfires, (2) document bird response to wildfires by combining landscape ecology and GIScience methods, and (3) link these patterns to snag monitoring plots and cavity‐nesting bird use to predict the probability of snag use by birds and cavity nesters based on snag characteristics (snag use model). The methods and results demonstrate how integration of landscape ecology with both GIS and GIScience improves the ways to study landscapes and land management issues, in this case offering guidelines for retention of snags that provide habitat for wildlife.     

Social Network Analysis of the Academic GIScience Community

There is mounting interest among scientists regarding the use of scientometric social network analysis, or quantitative analysis of the evolution of science as defined by individual researchers and the networks they form. Given that geographers have seldom used this approach compared to researchers in other fields, its implications for research and policy need to be assessed. We applied scientometric social network analysis to geographic information science (GIScience) to understand how the field has evolved over the last sixteen years and to assess the applicability of the standard logistic model of the growth of scientific disciplines. In particular, we examined collaboration in the field at multiple scales, namely, the evolution of the entire research network structure, the nature of subnetworks in defining geographic information science, and the roles individuals play within the community. By delineating how collaborations and research networks have evolved in GIScience, the study addresses the potential of scientometric social network analysis for geography.     

地理信息科学领域国际学术期刊等级的调查分析

2013 年7 月至8 月,作者开展了首次“中国地理信息科学（GISci） 领域科研人员心目中的本领域国际学术期刊等级”问卷调查,对回收的37 份问卷进行分析后得出了中国（含港澳台地区） GISci 领域科研人员心目中的本领域55 种国际学术期刊排名情况。比较了本次调查结果与国际上此前公布的唯一一次、但无中国学者参与的GISci 领域国际学术期刊等级问卷调查结果间的异同。与SCI/SSCI 期刊影响因子相比照,发现目前SCI/SSCI 检索期刊总体上能较好地覆盖GISci 领域的国际学术期刊,但SCI/SSCI 期刊影响因子尚不能较好体现中国学者心目中本领域期刊的等级。本次问卷调查结果的公布能够促进GISci 领域的中国青年科研人员及研究生对本领域学术期刊的了解,避免目前常常仅以影响因子来评价本领域国际学术期刊所产生的偏颇。     

Ontological considerations in GIScience

Ontology is a significant research theme in GIScience. While some researchers believe that the progress in GIScience is being directed through an engagement with the concept of ontology, some dismiss it as irrelevant. This paper is aimed at (i) exploring the theoretical and practical roles of ontologies; (ii) making the definitions and terminology explicit; (iii) assessing the applicability of ontology to problems in the geographical domain; and (iv) assessing whether a unified approach to ontology exists in GIScience. The results will be helpful for GIScientists in (i) understanding the validity of employing ontology within their own work, (ii) assessing what operational framework of terms and methods to use for developing their own ontology, and (iii) to assess what existing ontological models are available and applicable within their domain or application. A comprehensive and critical review will also help in identifying the signficant issues and directing future research agenda in GIScience.     

Web-based geospatial multiple criteria decision analysis using open software and standards

The emerging ubiquity of geospatial information is providing an unprecedented opportunity to apply Geographical Information Systems (GIS)-based multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to a broad spectrum of use cases. Volunteered geographic information, open GIS software, geoservice-based tools, cloud-based virtualized platforms, and worldwide collaboration of both domain experts and general users have greatly increased the quantity and accessibility of geospatially referenced data resources. Currently, there is a lack of GIS-based MCDA tools that integrate this decision-driven process within a widely accessible, robust geoframework environment, designed for user-friendly interaction. In this contribution, we present a conceptual workflow and proof-of-concept software application, Geocentric Environment for Analysis and Reasoning (GEAR), which provides a viable transition path to enhance geospatial MCDA in the age of open GIS. We propose a Web-based platform that leverages open-source geotechnologies to incorporate a wide variety of geospatial data formats in a common solution space to allow for spatially enhanced and time-relevant decision analysis. Through the proposed workflow, a user can ingest and modify heterogeneous data formats, exploit temporally tagged data sources, create multicriteria decision analysis models, and visualize the results in an iterative and collaborative workspace. A sample case study applied to disaster relief is used to demonstrate the prototype and workflow. This proof-of-concept Web-based application provides a notional pathway of how to connect open-source data to open-source analysis through a geospatially enabled MCDA workflow that could be virtually accessible to many levels of decision makers from individuals to entire organizations.     

Discovering relative motion patterns in groups of moving point objects

Technological advances in position‐aware devices are leading to a wealth of data documenting motion. The integration of spatio‐temporal data‐mining techniques in GIScience is an important research field to overcome the limitations of static Geographic Information Systems with respect to the emerging volumes of data describing dynamics. This paper presents a generic geographic knowledge discovery approach for exploring the motion of moving point objects, the prime modelling construct to represent GPS tracked animals, people, or vehicles. The approach is based on the concept of geospatial lifelines and presents a formalism for describing different types of lifeline patterns that are generalizable for many application domains. Such lifeline patterns allow the identification and quantification of remarkable individual motion behaviour, events of distinct group motion behaviour, so as to relate the motion of individuals to groups. An application prototype featuring novel data‐mining algorithms has been implemented and tested with two case studies: tracked soccer players and data points representing political entities moving in an abstract ideological space. In both case studies, a set of non‐trivial and meaningful motion patterns could be identified, for instance highlighting the characteristic ‘offside trap’ behaviour in the first case and identifying trendsetting districts anticipating a political transformation in the latter case.     

The convergence of GIS and social media: challenges for GIScience

It is hard to believe that 10 years have passed since we wrote our guest editorial for IJGIS (Sui and Goodchild 2001 Sui, D.Z. and Goodchild, M.F. 2001. Are GIS becoming new media?. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15(5): 387–390. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Using the nascent evidence that emerged in the late 1990s, we speculated back in 2001 that geographic information systems (GIS) were rapidly becoming part of the mass media. On the basis of the proposition of GIS as media, we were able to link GIScience with theories in media studies such as Marshall McLuhan's law of the media, which considers modern media as modifiable perceptive extensions of human thought (Sui and Goodchild 2003 Sui, D.Z. and Goodchild, M.F. 2003. A tetradic analysis of GIS and society using McLuhan's law of media. Canadian Geographers, 47(1): 5–17. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Remarkable conceptual and technological advances in GIS have been made during the past 10 years. The goal of this review is to provide an update on the ‘GIS as media’ argument we made 10 years ago and to discuss the new challenges for GIScience posed by the growing convergence of GIS and social media.     

GIScience for a driverless age

A driverless or autonomous vehicle requires significant support from information technology, both from central databases and from local sensors. The requirements for route guidance are in many ways more demanding than those of current guidance technologies, especially in the ‘last mile’ of a route. Significant extensions are needed for both street-centerline and point-of-interest databases. How these should be captured and structured present significant research challenges for GIScience. The societal and longer term impacts of such extensions are perhaps even more in need of focused research by the GIScience community.     

Computing the semantic similarity of geographic terms using volunteered lexical definitions

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is generated by heterogenous ‘information communities’ that co-operate to produce reusable units of geographic knowledge. A consensual lexicon is a key factor to enable this open production model. Lexical definitions help demarcate the boundaries of terms, forming a thin semantic ground on which knowledge can travel. In VGI, lexical definitions often appear to be inconsistent, circular, noisy and highly idiosyncratic. Computing the semantic similarity of these ‘volunteered lexical definitions’ has a wide range of applications in GIScience, including information retrieval, data mining and information integration. This article describes a knowledge-based approach to quantify the semantic similarity of lexical definitions. Grounded in the recursive intuition that similar terms are described using similar terms, the approach relies on paraphrase-detection techniques and the lexical database WordNet. The cognitive plausibility of the approach is evaluated in the context of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Semantic Network, obtaining high correlation with human judgements. Guidelines are provided for the practical usage of the approach.     

Genocide and GIScience: Integrating Personal Narratives and Geographic Information Science to Study Human Rights

This project combines qualitative data of personal narratives with geographic information science (GIScience) technologies to explore the potential for critical cartography in the study of mass atrocity. The case study used is northern Uganda, where millions have been affected by physical violence and hardship, displacement, and fear. Web-based virtual globes as a ready source of imagery for remote areas and derived spatial data imported to geographic information systems (GIS) provide quantified data that complement testimonials and other qualitative data from the field. Cartographic functions, geovisualization, and spatial analyses available in GIS are used to extract information from high-resolution remote sensing images documenting internally displaced persons (IDP) camps and quantifying evidence of crimes against humanity. These techniques explore spatial relationships and communicate results on the extent and impact of the atrocities in northern Uganda.     

A unified approach for location-allocation analysis: integrating GIS,distributed computing and spatial optimization

Location-allocation modeling is an important area of research in spatial optimization and GIScience. A large number of analytical models for location-allocation analysis have been developed in the past 50 years to meet the requirements of different planning and spatial-analytic applications, ranging from the location of emergency response units (EMS) to warehouses and transportation hubs. Despite their great number, many location-allocation models are intrinsically linked to one another. A well-known example is the theoretical link between the classic p-median problem and coverage location problems. Recently, Lei and Church showed that a large number of classic and new location models can be posed as special case problems of a new modeling construct called the vector assignment ordered median problem (VAOMP). Lei and Church also reported extremely high computational complexity in optimally solving the best integer linear programming (ILP) formulation developed for the VAOMP even for medium-sized problems in certain cases.

In this article, we develop an efficient unified solver for location-allocation analysis based on the VAOMP model without using ILP solvers. Our aim is to develop a fast heuristic algorithm based on the Tabu Search (TS) meta-heuristic, and message passing interface (MPI) suitable for obtaining optimal or near-optimal solutions for the VAOMP in a real-time environment. The unified approach is particularly interesting from the perspective of GIScience and spatial decision support systems (DSS) as it makes it possible to solve a wide variety of location models in a unified manner in a GIS environment. Computational results show that the TS method can often obtain in seconds, solutions that are better than those obtained using the ILP-based approach in hours or a day.     

Are prominent mountains frequently mentioned in text? Exploring the spatial expressiveness of text frequency

Data-driven GIScience shows a growing interest in making spatial information from large text data. In this paper, we quantify and thus evaluate the relation between text frequency and properties of the outer-text, geographic setting by comparing text frequencies of mountain names to the respective geomorphometric characteristics. We focus on some 2000 unique mountain names that appear some 50,000 times in a large compilation of texts on Swiss alpine history. The results on the full data set suggest only a weak relation: only 5–10% of the variation in the text frequency being explained by the respective geomorphometric characteristics. However, an analysis of multiple scales allows us to identify a Simpson’s Paradox. What appears to be ‘noise’ in the analysis of all mountains in the whole of Switzerland shows significant local signals. Small spatial extents, found all over Switzerland, can show considerably strong correlations between text frequency and spatial prominence, with up to 90% of the total variation explained. We argue that our findings have practical implications for data-driven GIScience. Retrieving meaningful spatial information from text might only be possible if the spatial scale of analysis reflects the spatial scale described in the input text documents.     

GIS系统集成的理论与实践

本文探讨了ＧＩＳ系统集成的若干理论问题，集成系统的体系结构及系统集成的方法与步骤，并结合作者在“八五”攻关课题“洪水灾害遥感监测与评估技术研究”以及“重大自然灾害遥感监测评估集成系统研究”中的实践，介绍了集成的内容和若干工程性提出了运用对象连接与嵌入技术实现模型与ＧＩＳ动态集成的方法。     

Developing open space networks in shrinking cities

Urban green spaces provide essential ecosystem services and improve resident quality of life, but open space networks are often fragmented by urban development, and it is difficult to reclaim natural lands after they have been built up. Shrinking cities (i.e., cities experiencing population decline) typically contain an abundance of vacant and abandoned residential buildings that are demolished for safety and maintenance reasons. The resulting empty lots can potentially be reclaimed as natural areas to defragment the green network and increase open space connectivity. To date however, planning efforts have largely ignored post-demolition land uses for these lots, allowing many to become empty wastelands. This research approaches this gap by presenting an alternative plan for residential demolition sites using landscape ecology principles and methods to incorporate them into the open space network. Using Buffalo, NY – a typical rustbelt shrinking city – as a case study, areas most at risk for experiencing demolitions are identified using a clustering technique, and each building within the cluster is assigned a likelihood it will be demolished using a logit model. Properties with the highest risk for demolition are then prioritized based on their ability to contribute to and connect the open space network using landscape connectivity metrics. Results indicate the approach can foster large increases in green network connectivity using small parcels (a 356% increase in total open space area was observed in this study after three years of purposeful selection), allowing cities to reclaim unused urban areas and defragment the open space network.