A Framework for the Future of the Spatial Sciences

Transcription

1 A Framework for the Future of the Spatial Sciences This report summarizes the deliberations of a workshop on the future of the spatial sciences that was held at the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island from 25 th to 27 th April, 2011 and sponsored by the Center for Spatial Analysis at the University of Oklahoma and the Spatial Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. The Fellows of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of UCGIS, and editors of five prominent spatial science journals were invited. The fifteen individuals listed below from these groups participated in the workshop: Sean Ahearn, Department of Geography, Hunter College, City University of New York Arthur Getis, Department of Geography, San Diego State University Daniel Goldberg, Spatial Sciences Institute, University of Southern California Michael Goodchild, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara Karen Kemp, Spatial Sciences Institute, University of Southern California Nina Lam, Department of Environmental Studies, Louisiana State University Carolyn Merry, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science, Ohio State University Timothy Nyerges, Department of Geography, University of Washington Harlan Onsrud, Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering, University of Maine Brandon Plewe, Department of Geography, Brigham Young University Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Department of Urban Affairs and Planning, Hunter College, City University of New York Kathleen Stewart, Department of Geography, University of Iowa Lynn Usery, Center of Excellence for Geographic Information Science, U.S. Geological Survey John Wilson, Spatial Sciences Institute, University of Southern California May Yuan, Center for Spatial Analysis, University of Oklahoma The report, itself, was prepared by the workshop chair, John Wilson, and the various parts which follow summarize recent trends and emerging opportunities that will help to shape the future role and character of the spatial sciences across the academy. That said, the report should be of interest to those members of the academy who use spatial perspectives in their teaching and/or research. 1. From Geographic Information Science to the Spatial Sciences This report about the future of the spatial sciences is both ambitious and forward-looking given the tremendous growth in the number and variety of disciplines and groups within the academy whose members use spatial perspectives in their teaching and/or research. Some of these individuals are concerned with the core topics (principles of geographic information science: spatial cognition, spatial databases, spatial analysis, modeling, and visualization) whilst others focus on the various ways in which a spatial perspective might be employed in a series of academic disciplines (computer science, ecology, epidemiology, geography, sociology, the humanities, etc.) or application domains (environment, health, transportation, etc.). Drawing on concepts and ideas that originate in computer science, geography and other fields, the modern spatial scientist might be identified by their use of the map as a research instrument, space as a reasoning framework, or one or more of the core geospatial technologies (GIS, GPS, remote sensing, etc.). The recent establishment of the Geography and Spatial Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation, new interdisciplinary spatial sciences centers (i.e. the Spatial Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California), new academic programs (i.e. the Spatial Studies Minor at the University of California, Santa Barbara) and new journals (i.e. Journal of Spatial Information Science) point to the emergence of the spatial sciences as a cross-cutting and transformative field that can contribute to both basic and applied research across the academy. 1

2 2. GIScience Accomplishments During the Past 20 Years The tremendous accomplishments that has characterized geographic information science and related fields during the past two decades have been documented in several recent handbooks (e.g. Kemp 2008, Nyerges et al. 2011, Shekhar and Xiong 2008, Wilson and Fotheringham 2007) and review articles (e.g. Goodchild 2010) and can be grouped under four broad headings as follows: Advances in GIScience theory and methodology o Rapid development of increasingly sophisticated spatial data models to support spatially enabled work across an increasing number and variety of knowledge areas and application domains o Increased support for object modeling and representing dynamic spatiotemporal processes and patterns, identifying and characterizing spatiotemporal relationships, etc. o The development and deployment of robust and clever methods for the interrogation, analysis, modeling and visualization of geospatial data in a variety of open source and proprietary software systems see Anselin et al. (2006), Fotheringham et al. (2002), Guo (2008), Hutchinson (1995), and Rey and Janikas (2006) for exemplary contributions in these areas o Situational answers for many of the problems that were articulated as part of the UCGIS research agenda (McMaster and Usery 2004) for example, we are now able to successfully model and manage complexities such as time, generalization, and uncertainty in specific application contexts Sustained technology innovation, usability, and transfer o Continued growth in the numbers and variety of open source and proprietary software solutions that support various forms of spatial query, analysis, modeling, and visualization o Continued progress in the development and adoption of protocols and standards to support interoperability among software providers and users some are owed to the work of the Open Geospatial Consortium and some to the development and dissemination of spatial data infrastructures Consensus on curriculum and workforce development o Development and publication of the Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge (DiBiase et al. 2006) o The establishment of a series of geospatial professional certification initiatives the most prominent examples are the Certified Mapping Scientist (GIS/LIS certification) from the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and GISP (Geographic Information System-Professional) certification from the GIS Certification Institute o Development and publication of the Geospatial Technology Competency Model (DiBiase et al. 2010) and a series of geospatial job descriptions by the U.S. Department of Labor (consistent with their recognition of "geospatial" as one of three most promising areas for job growth in the next years) Planting the seeds for a spatially enabled society o Most everyone knows about GIS and/or GPS nowadays o The initiation of a series of spatially inspired cyberinfrastructure research and educational projects o The diffusion of geospatial concepts and ideas into other disciplines see Ethington (2007) and Scholten et al. (2009) for examples documenting their spread to the humanities and sciences, respectively o The rapid development, spread and adoption of a variety of spatially-enabled tools to serve society 2

3 3. The Changing Context of the Spatial Sciences The aforementioned accomplishments coupled with the sweeping societal and technological changes listed below have elevated the need to integrate basic and applied research and innovation on the one hand and research, education, and best practices (i.e. training) on the other. The launch and spread of new technologies o The Internet and all of its implications for publishing and sharing geospatial knowledge, data, and services o Online mapping and query engines (i.e. Bing Maps, Google Maps, Google Earth, Yahoo Maps) o The Global Positioning System (GPS) o Social media The spread of geospatial information and tools across all levels of government o Geospatial information and GIS tools are now used extensively by the federal as well as state and local governments o The federal government has taken a leadership role through the work of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) and National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC), its sponsorship and support of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) and more recently the appointment of Geospatial Information Officers and the launch of a single geospatial platform to serve every federal agency o The emergence of the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) to represent the geospatial aspirations and needs of state and local governments The growth and diversification of a geospatial industry o A rapidly expanding and diversified private sector consisting of a series of large IT companies (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo), GIS-centric software and services providers (e.g. Esri), large geospatial data providers (e.g. Digital Globe, Navtec, TeleAtlas) and a series of specialized startups (e.g. CitySourced) that provides a variety of software and services Increasing concerns with privacy issues o Privacy conflicts have become more evident in society as a result of both online and mobile technologies and the momentum is growing for ethics-driven design and deployment of technology to protect core human values such as privacy The widening gap between technology support and human capacity o The GIScience accomplishments listed in the previous section point to the availability of many more robust and sophisticated tools but their deployment has lagged behind development and there is now a widening gap between these capabilities and best practices o There is also the problem that many of the latest tools are complicated and our ability to teach about all of these capabilities in a small number of "GIS" classes is rapidly diminishing The changing priorities and expectations of society at large o The public expects both basic and applied research to help solve day-to-day challenges and problems connected with climate change, enduring poverty, homeland security, livable communities and sustainable development, among others o The federal government s funding priorities have changed along with the public s expectations and increased concern for public safety (homeland security, defense and intelligence) 4. Hot Topics in the Spatial Sciences Many of our most important and enduring challenges would benefit from a spatial perspective. The academy can help to create and sustain a spatially-enabled society by addressing the following challenges and problems. 3

4 The need for new forms of geospatial data analysis, modeling and visualization to support new data acquisition methods and data types o The overarching goal is to be able to use seemingly unrelated facts to determine a shared understanding and for this we will need a series of new and expanded data models that support and can, in turn, be supported by the geospatial semantic web o The explosion of real-time and streaming sensor networks requires new methods and tools for capturing and integrating these new data with traditional data types in spatial workflows o Social networks and social media can be expected to contribute new forms of spatiotemporal data and thereby increase the use of crowd-sourced and volunteered geographic data in these spatial workflows as well o Both of the aforementioned trends will bring new opportunities and challenges the former may include development of technologies and protocols that would support access to sensitive data without compromising confidentiality and the latter calls for continued attention to the characterization and interpretation of data quality in spatial workflows o The need to be able to place the results of GIS analyses on a firm scientific footing o There may also be some value in pondering why the visual is so pervasive and why sound is not used more in geospatial applications The increasing realization that space and time must be considered in tandem to identify and understand dynamic phenomena, events, and relationships o There is an urgent need for new methods to characterize, model and visualize geographic dynamics, including dynamic, temporary features of our environment (i.e. tornadoes), the principles and cues that guide specific human behaviors (i.e. large scale evacuations due to natural disasters or other threats), and relationships that can only be discovered and understood by simultaneously considering space and time o There is also a need for more work on data acquisition since many of our existing data capture technologies and sensor networks are focused on outdoor environments when people typically spend the vast majority (~80-90%) of their time indoors we cannot imagine building and supporting a spatially enabled society without tackling the challenges connected with spatial orientation and location enablement in these environments The need to formalize the functionality of GIScience o There are currently no standards for the functionality that is captured and promulgated by various proprietary and open source software systems this has emerged as a fundamental research question for cybergis in particular and service-oriented architectures more generally o This need is exacerbated by the new data types and data acquisition methods because current practice relies on a series of heuristics (rules) to gather and disseminate what we know of both the physical and social worlds when, for example, should we substitute volunteered geographic information for data collected by some administrative body or mapping agency? o There is also a need to develop methods to calibrate and validate spatio-temporal models and agents so that we can connect specific outputs and behaviors to more general principles and/or some larger picture of what is happening in the world around us The increasing recognition that place is important across many academic disciplines and application domains o The federal government has established a series of "place-based" initiatives in hopes of addressing and alleviating some of society s most vexing problems o The so-called "spatial turn" that has occurred in the humanities and social sciences this paradigm shift has proceeded from the elemental recognition that all human action literally takes place to the realization that the spatial dimension of social interaction is of paramount importance for understanding all of the classic questions about the human condition (e.g. Ethington 2007) 4

5 o There is, consistent with the aforementioned paradigm shift, a growing opportunity to use place names (rather than geographic coordinates) as a way to identify and interpret points of interest from the distant past all the way to the present and further research is needed to enable these views of the world around us (e.g. Chiang 2010) The role of spatial orientation and location enablement as fundamental building blocks for a spatially enabled society o The growth of new platforms (cloud computing, mobile devices) and service-oriented architectures is likely to increase the availability, relevance and importance of real-time location-based services o Many individuals want "now-casting" services that will tell them about the current state of their neighborhood or region or perhaps the whole planet o There is a need for collaborative, future-oriented research projects that are focused on the social and environmental issues that matter to people and are organized around the principles of geodesign o There is also a need for formal models and ontologies that span individual as well as group dynamics and both permanent and temporary relationships and/or outcomes what would a formal model and ontology for digital citizenship look like for example? The need to expand and promote the role of spatial thinking and spatial reasoning across the curriculum o There is a need for new programs and courses that show how the spatial perspective can help with the discovery of new relationships across many academic disciplines and application domains o There is a need for new forms of output, including customized, machine-enabled summaries and spatial narratives that describe specific places or regions of interest 5. Opportunities for UCGIS Next, we offer some initial thoughts on how the UCGIS might reorganize itself at the national level to better serve its members and the nation as a whole given past accomplishments and the broader societal and technology trends noted above. The UCGIS was established in 1995 when it was possible to imagine bringing the spatial sciences under one umbrella. The initial goal was to grow the work and impact of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) which had been very successful in building some initial teaching materials to support geographic information science teaching (when very few textbooks were available) and in connecting individuals with common or at least complementary research interests by way of a series of specialist meetings. The UCGIS was organized from the outset around a series of institutional (as opposed to individual) memberships that were designed to energize and inform what was happening on individual campuses and on the national stage. The former was handled informally (see Palladino and Kemp 1991 for six models of how to build and sustain GIS labs on university campuses) and the latter was handled by way of an annual Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C. focused on geospatial lobbying and a Summer Assembly that was mostly focused on research (but occasionally focused on education) and whose location moved around the country. There is a need to ask whether these protocols serve the academy as well today as they did when the UCGIS was first established. One of the most important questions to ask is about the membership: Who could or should be served? Whilst the answer (the academy) has probably not changed since 1995, the composition and liaisons of the core GIScience faculty probably have changed. The fact that spatial perspectives have spread from research universities to the entire academy (i.e. community colleges, small liberal arts colleges and universities predominantly serving undergraduates) and a variety of units (i.e. centers, departments, disciplines, institutes, etc.) gives rise to the need for UCGIS to consider how it would engage a broader cross-section of the community than we have done thus far. 5

6 Similarly, technology can help to connect the member institutions with the national organization and it may afford the opportunity to re-imagine the ways in which services are delivered. For example, some thought might be given to combining the Winter Meeting and the current Summer Assembly into a single annual meeting in hopes of creating and sponsoring the nation s premier academic spatial sciences conference. For those who have found value in the lobbying activities that were often the focus of the Winter Meeting, it is worth reiterating that the federal government has now launched a geospatial strategy that spans every branch of government and that various groups working in other knowledge domains may provide models for garnering research support that did not rely on such a meeting to build momentum. Such a reputation would, of course, need to be earned over several years but some of the ingredients are known. This meeting would need to engage both senior and junior scholars, provide fast and transparent opportunities for publication, connect basic and applied research as well as research and education and most importantly, it would need to include the hot topics noted above and the "hot" technologies. The latter of course, also means that it would need to draw on and blend some of the exciting things that are happening in both the technology (the Where 2.0 crowd for example) and a variety of other domains. Less concrete but potentially useful activities for such a revitalized and reoriented UCGIS might involve taking leadership positions in building the grassroots support needed to establish a community of scholars with sufficient heft to propose collaborative research initiatives that NSF or NIH might fund, in organizing a series of specialist meetings (hot topics) to bring interested scholars together and accelerate advances of knowledge on these topics, and in organizing a series of regular meetings aimed at senior graduate students and young scholars similar to what is done in Canada (by way of the GEOIDE Network) and Europe (by way of the Vespucci Institute). 6. Get Involved This document was prepared to start a conversation about the future of the spatial sciences and the role of the UCGIS in helping to build and sustain a vibrant community of spatial science scholars across the academy. That said, your comments and suggestions for how we might strengthen this document and the guidance it affords those interested in the UCGIS and spatial sciences generally can be sent to John Wilson in the Spatial Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (jpwilson@usc.edu). 7. References Cited Anselin, L., Syabri, I., and Kho, Y. (2006) GeoDa: An introduction to spatial data analysis. Geographical Analysis 38: 5-22 Chiang, Y.Y. (2010) Harvesting Geographic Features from Heterogeneous Raster Maps. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California DiBiase, D.W., DeMers, M.N., Johnson, A.J., Kemp, K.K., Taylor-Luck, A., Plewe, B.S., and Wentz, E.A. (ed.) (2006) Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge (First Edition). Washington, D.C., Association of American Geographers and University Consortium for Geographic Information Science DiBiase, D.W., Corbin, T., Fox, T., Francica, J., Green, K., Jackson, J., Jeffress, G., Jones, B., Jones, B., Mennis, J., Schuckman, K., Smith, C., and Van Sickle, J. (2010) The new Geospatial Technology Competency Model: Bringing workforce needs into focus. URISA Journal 22(2): Ethington, P.J. (2007) Placing the past: Groundwork for a spatial theory of history. Rethinking History 11: (forum with responses to Ethington s essay by T. Bender, D. Carr, E. Casey, E. Dimendberg, and A. Munslow) Fotheringham, A.S., Brunsdon, C., and Charlton, M. (2002) Geographically Weighted Regression: The Analysis of Spatially Varying Relationships. New York, John Wiley and Sons Goodchild, M.F. (2010) Twenty years of progress: GIScience in Journal of Spatial Information Science 1: 3-20 Guo, D. (2008) Regionalization with dynamically constrained agglomerative clustering and partitioning (REDCAP). International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22:

7 Hutchinson, M.F. (1995) Interpolating mean rainfall using thin plate smoothing splines. International Journal of GIS 9: Kemp, K.K. (ed.) (2008) Encyclopedia of Geographic Information Science. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications McMaster, R.B. and Usery, E.L. (ed.) (2004) A Research Agenda for Geographic Information Science. Boca Raton, FL, CRC Press Nyerges, T.L., Couclelis, H., and McMaster, R.B. (ed.) (2011) The SAGE Handbook of GIS and Society. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications Pallidino, S.D. and Kemp, K.K. (1991) GIS Teaching Facilities: Six Case Studies on the Acquisition and Management of Laboratories. Santa Barbara, CA, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, University of California at Santa Barbara Rey, S. and Janikas, M.V. (2006) STARS: Space-Time Analysis of Regional Systems. Geographical Analysis 38: Scholten, H.J., van de Velde, R., and van Manen, N. (ed.) (2009) Geospatial Technology and the Role of Location in Science. Berlin, Springer Shekhar, S. and Xiong, H. (ed.) (2008) Encyclopedia of GIS. Berlin, Springer Wilson, J.P. and Fotheringham, A.S. (ed.) (2007) Handbook of Geographic Information Science. Oxford, Blackwell 7