Annals of GIS

Vol. 15, No. 1, June 2009, 3–9

Geographic information systems and science: today and tomorrow

Michael F. Goodchild*
Department of Geography, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
(Received 4 April 2009; final version received 10 May 2009)

Great strides have been made in geographic information systems and science over the past 14 years: through the development
of spatial data infrastructures and the infrastructure of data sharing; through advances in the technologies of positioning, data
acquisition, data dissemination, and data analysis; and through advances in the science that lies behind the technology. Five
future scenarios are examined: a world in which it is possible to know where everything is at all times; a world of positioning,
representation, and wayfinding that is fully three dimensional; a world that involves the citizen as both consumer and producer
of geographic information; a world of ready access to predictions of future landscapes; and a world of real-time dynamic
information.
Keywords: Geographic information system; geographic information science; positioning; representation; geospatial dynamics

1. Introduction Journal of Geographical Information Science). It is not

In 1995 I wrote an article for the first issue of the new surprising therefore that my 1995 paper began with a dis-
journal Geographic Information Sciences (Goodchild cussion of the term’s meaning and of the implications of its
1995) in which I speculated on future directions for the adoption by, for example, the newly formed US University
field. Fourteen years later the journal is changing its name Consortium for Geographic Information Science. There was
to the Annals of GIS, and it seems appropriate therefore to great excitement in 1995 about the potential of the new
review that earlier paper, to examine the degree to which its information-based economy and information industries,
speculations became reality, and to think about the years and GIScience seemed well positioned to benefit from it.
ahead. Of course prediction is notoriously risky, a striking This was also the period of first excitement about the
example being the failure of the massive two-volume state- concept of spatial data infrastructure, following the defini-
of-the-art review of GIS in 1991 (Maguire et al. 1991) to tive report of the US National Research Council (NRC
anticipate the enormous impact that the Web would have 1993) and President Clinton’s Executive Order 12906,
beginning in 1993. establishing the National Spatial Data Infrastructure
The first part of this paper reviews the earlier survey and (NSDI). It is clear now in hindsight that the GIScience
discusses its successes and failures. The second part looks at community was remarkably ahead of the game in develop-
the state of the geographic information technologies in 2009 ing the components of NSDI: the metadata standards, geo-
and the major discoveries that have been made to date in portals, and search mechanisms that support widespread
geographic information science. The third part of the paper sharing of geographic information. Perhaps this was due
looks at the future, presents a vision for the state of geo- to the particularly well-defined and bounded nature of geo-
graphic information technologies 5–10 years ahead, and graphic information compared to other types of informa-
describes the major challenges that remain in geographic tion, and perhaps it was due to the proximity of a large and
information science. flourishing private sector and dedicated government agen-
cies. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the community was
many years ahead of other communities, such as the hydrol-
ogists or the ecologists, in the development of its data
2. Fourteen years of development infrastructure.
The term geographic information science (GIScience) was The Open Geospatial Consortium was just beginning its
first defined in 1992 (Goodchild 1992), and it was adopted work in 1995, and since then it has grown into a highly
in 1995 as the name of the new journal (substantially pre- effective mechanism for developing and encouraging the
dating the renaming of the International Journal of adoption of a series of important standards. Most notable
Geographical Information Systems to the International among these are the Web standards WMS, WFS, WCS, and

*Email: good@geog.ucsb.edu

ISSN 1947-5683 print/ISSN 1947-5691 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/19475680903250715
http://www.informaworld.com
4 M.F. Goodchild

WPS, which today form the essential backbone of Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth have brought
Web-based geographic information services. NSDI also digital geographic information within reach of just about
anticipated the patchwork approach to geographic informa- anyone and have essentially democratized what for many
tion production that is now so evident in the contributions years was viewed as the domain of highly trained experts.
being made by the general public through volunteered geo- At the same time, much has been done to address the
graphic information (VGI; Elwood 2008). I ended the sec- comment I made in that concluding section, at a time
tion with a comment on ‘the pressing need to extend when students learned GIS via the command line, that
(NSDI)’s principles to the international and global arenas’, ‘GIS is too difficult to use’. The WIMP (windows, icons,
a need that is now ably met by the work of the Global Spatial menus, pointer) interface that took over GIS design in the
Data Infrastructure Association. late 1990s greatly reduced the pain students experienced in
The second major section of my 1995 paper dealt with learning GIS, though it did not remove it entirely.
digital spatial data libraries, the difficulties traditional
libraries face in sorting items by spatial and temporal
frames, and the power of digital systems to enable such
3. Geographic information systems and science in
searches based on metadata – in effect, to answer the ques-
2009
tion ‘What have you got about there, (and possibly) then?’
In 1994 the US National Science Foundation had funded 3.1. Systems
our Alexandria Digital Library project, one of the first to The geographic information technologies of 2009 seem to
attempt to implement an online library of geographic infor- fall into four more-or-less well-defined categories: systems
mation, or what was subsequently termed a geolibrary for positioning, data acquisition, data dissemination, and
(Goodchild 1998). At the time several technical difficulties analysis. The following section discusses each of these in
were immediately apparent: How should one present the turn, reviewing the state of the art and identifying areas
concept of scale, for example, to users who might have no where new developments can be expected in the near future.
understanding of basic cartographic principles? How should
one enable users to specify location, when users might not
be able to find an area of interest on a map, let alone specify 3.1.1. Positioning
its latitude and longitude? How should one deal with areas The global positioning system (GPS) and its Russian and
of interest that have no well-defined boundaries, such as European analogs have revolutionized the measurement of
‘the Atlantic Ocean’ or ‘downtown Santa Barbara’? position on the Earth’s surface, making it possible for the
Today all of these issues have been addressed, in part first time in human history to determine the position of an
by research in the academic GIScience community. The object quickly and cheaply (Kennedy 2002). Versions of
general public has become familiar with the concept of GPS can be embedded in mobile phones, wristwatches, and
zoom and with its expression in the user interfaces of sites vehicles, and millions of densely sampled tracks are now
such as Google Maps and MapQuest. The ability to recog- being acquired every day in the interests of map-making,
nize a place name or street address and to translate it to wildlife management, and the modeling of human spatial
latitude/longitude is now routine and scarcely worthy of behavior. GPS has led to a new dynamism in the world of
mention. But some issues remain. Almost no progress has geographic information, which is for the first time able to
been made, for example, on the elusive problem of monitor and analyze changes on the Earth’s surface as they
content-based search. It is still far from easy to search occur. Citizens are now able to monitor the progress of a
across large collections of satellite images for pictures flight, or the arrival of a bus, using simple devices to access
containing a golf course, or a hurricane, and it is still Web sites that broadcast such information in real time.
necessary to rely on the annotations and tags that humans GPS remains a technology of the outdoors, however, as
attach to pictures in repositories such as Flickr. Similarly, its signals are lost under dense tree cover, in buildings, and
our geolibraries still function as collections of data sets, even in deep urban canyons. Route guidance systems, such
preserving the essential granularity of geographic informa- as the familiar vehicle satnav, remain limited to locations
tion that was established when the information was where strong signals are available. Yet humans spend only a
acquired. The potential for search across a seamless data- small fraction of their lives in such places, and we have as
base is still largely unfulfilled. yet no reliable technology or data to support wayfinding
Both of these issues, of NSDI and the geolibrary, were at within complex three-dimensional structures such as retail
the top of my own research agenda in 1995. In the conclud- complexes, subway stations, airports, or hospitals.
ing section of the paper I noted the substantial progress that RFID (radio frequency identification; Ayson and Ilyas
had been made in popularizing GIS across the various 2008) is rapidly becoming an important form of positioning
disciplines of the academy. Today, of course, that progress technology, used to track the movement of goods from
has continued to encompass large parts of the general pub- producer through retailer to consumer, to track pets and
lic, at least on this side of the digital divide. Services such as farm animals, and to manage building materials on
 Annals of GIS 5

construction sites. RFID may yet prove to be the best documented. Whether their magnitude is greater or less,
technology for indoor tracking, though many other possible however, is not as clear.
solutions are being developed.

3.1.3. Data dissemination

The traditional media for dissemination of compiled geo-
3.1.2. Data acquisition graphic information – paper maps, globes, and atlases –
Satellite and airborne remote sensing is now firmly estab- were expensive to produce, cumbersome to ship and
lished as a major source of geographic information (Jensen house, and difficult to catalog. Map libraries emerged as
2007). Optical panchromatic sensors now image the Earth’s one solution to these issues, sequestering geographic infor-
surface at 50 cm resolution, while multispectral sensors add mation in specialized departments that developed their own
the potential for detailed differentiation of surface types. systems of collection management. When aerial photogra-
Research has shown that an enormous variety of variables phy emerged as a new and rich source of geographic infor-
and phenomena can be detected using different parts of the mation, beginning in the early twentieth century, it merely
electromagnetic spectrum. Radar and microwave sources added to the existing problems of custodianship.
have been deployed to detect variables such as surface By the early 1990s, however, substantial portions of
elevation and even to differentiate aspects of the subsurface these collections had begun to migrate to digital media,
under appropriate conditions, and LiDAR uses optical first magnetic tape and later CDs and DVDs. The advent
wavelengths to achieve remarkably detailed and precise of the Web and the popularization of the Internet in the mid-
knowledge of ground elevation and tree cover. Recently 1990s led almost immediately to a new interest in the use of
ground-based LiDAR has proven of great value in acquiring electronic networks for dissemination and sharing.
three-dimensional models of urban form. Geographic data warehouses and digital libraries were
However, perhaps the most significant development quickly established, and by the turn of the century a vast
in geospatial data acquisition over the past few years amount of data could be accessed using simple search and
has been the rapid emergence of user-generated content, retrieval mechanisms. The term geolibrary was coined
a process by which users of the Internet are able to (Goodchild 1998) to describe a digital collection of geo-
create and upload information. A variety of other terms graphic data sets that are searchable using location as the
describe this very recent phenomenon: Web 2.0, defined primary key.
as a reversal of the initial top-down flow of Web infor- More recently the concept of a geoportal (Maguire and
mation; and VGI (Elwood 2008), emphasizing the Longley 2005) has emerged. These are single points of
unpaid nature of the time its contributors spend on its entry into a network of linked repositories, offering search
creation. Typical contributors are citizens with little or across a unified catalog plus remote access to data sets that
no training or education in geography or cartography, remain housed in their original collections. The Geospatial
and the activity is sometimes known collectively as One-Stop (Goodchild et al. 2007) is a successful example,
neogeography (Turner 2006) to distinguish it from the linking hundreds of collections to thousands of users, and
traditional activities of geographers. similar portals are sponsored by many national, state, and
Unlike the geographic information produced by mapping local governments and non-governmental organizations.
agencies and corporations, VGI carries no authority or guar- In 2005 the appearance of virtual globes (Google Earth,
antees of accuracy. It is impossible, of course, for any system Microsoft Virtual Earth, etc.) and Web mapping sites such
of measurements, including measurements of phenomena on as Google Maps added another dimension to the technology
the Earth’s surface, to be perfect (Zhang and Goodchild of geographic information dissemination. By providing a
2002). Nevertheless evidence is accumulating that VGI can simple user interface and by publishing tools (application
be every bit as accurate (http://povesham.wordpress.com/tag/ programming interfaces, scripting languages) these services
osm/), mirroring the results of studies of other Web 2.0 sites quickly achieved a level of popular acceptance far beyond
such as Wikipedia (Giles 2005). Neogeographers use GPS that previously typical of geographic information systems
and mapping software to substitute for the skills that tradi- (Goodchild 2008). Users were able to access data provided
tional geographers acquired, and that justified their claims to by third parties, displaying them in simple graphical over-
authority. But unlike traditional geographic information there lays on the map base. Today hundreds of thousands of such
are no formal mechanisms for testing the quality of VGI or mashups can be found on the Web, and the number is
for reporting its quality in metadata. While traditional geo- expanding constantly.
graphic information has documented reports of quality, assur-
ing that inaccuracies are no more than allowed by published
standards, VGI carries no such assurances. In short, both 3.1.4. Analysis
sources are inevitably inaccurate, but the inaccuracies of The first efforts to build comprehensive computer applica-
traditional geographic information are tested and well tions for manipulating geographic information date from the
6 M.F. Goodchild

mid-1960s. Today the term GIS is widely accepted, and Any science should be measured by its discoveries, and
such systems are capable of a wide range of forms of in GIScience there have been some very significant discov-
manipulation and analysis (Longley et al. 2005). Some are eries in the past 14 years. These include theories of repre-
targeted at particular application domains, such as transpor- sentation, starting with the fundamental distinction between
tation; some emphasize particular types of geographic infor- discrete-object and continuous-field conceptualizations. In
mation, such as remotely sensed images; and some are essence this posits that there are two ways in which humans
particularly adapted to the needs of dynamic simulation of conceive of the geographic world around them: as a collec-
Earth processes (http://pcraster.geo.uu.nl/). tion of discrete things littering an otherwise empty space
Geographic information systems support a vast range of and as a collection of continuous variables. More recently
applications. In commerce, they are widely used to maintain object fields (Cova and Goodchild 2002) and metamaps
inventories of distributed assets in the utility industry, to (Takeyama and Couclelis 1997) have been added to the
manage marketing efforts and to determine optimal loca- collection and Goodchild et al. (2007) have shown that all
tions for retail businesses and services, and to schedule of these can be reduced to two unifying and fundamental
delivery and pickup services. In science, they are particu- concepts: geo-atoms and geo-dipoles.
larly useful for examining patterns of phenomena on the Very substantial progress has been made in the under-
Earth’s surface, formulating and testing hypotheses about standing of uncertainty or what the digital representations of
the spread of disease, the distribution of plant species and the world leave out – the differences between a digital
the behavior of animals, and the spatial organization of representation of the world in a GIS and the real world itself
society. In government, they are used to make choices (Zhang and Goodchild 2002). A representation must
between alternative planning options and to manage social approximate, generalize, or otherwise simplify what is in
services. In the military, they are essential to battlefield reality an infinitely complex world. Uncertainty includes
control. issues of error and inaccuracy and also encompasses all of
Many of the innovations in GIS of the past decade the issues that arise when humans use vaguely defined terms
concern the user interface. The adoption of WIMP inter- to describe, classify, and in other ways simplify the world
faces in the 1990s vastly improved the ease of use of GIS around them. We know much more than we did 14 years ago
software and greatly shortened the learning curve. Tools for about the propagation of uncertainty through GIS analysis
exploratory spatial data analysis, such as GeoDa (http:// (Heuvelink 1998), and we are beginning to develop rigor-
geodacenter.asu.edu/), greatly enhanced the ability of GIS ous methods for downscaling – in other words, for introdu-
to examine data from multiple perspectives in the interests cing detail into coarsely scaled data – using the framework
of hypothesis generation. New forms of representation of geostatistics (Boucher et al. 2008).
based on the object-oriented model also brought GIS closer Another area of important progress is in spatial cogni-
to how humans think about the world and expanded our tion, in other words in the ways in which humans learn and
ability to represent both hierarchical relationships and think about the world around them. Understanding of such
dynamics. Issues remain, however, in the representation of processes is critical if we are to improve the usability of
the third spatial dimension and in capturing phenomena that GIS, by making it more closely resemble the ways humans
are fundamentally continuous over the Earth’s surface, such themselves reason about the world. GIS is in many ways the
as terrain, roads, and rivers. interface between the informal, loose world of human cog-
nition and discourse and the rigorous, formal, and precise
world of digital computers. Should humans be required to
3.2. Science adapt themselves to the machine or can we find compro-
There are several ways of defining GIScience (Duckham mises that make it easier for machines to assist humans in
et al. 2003), but all of them convey a similar message: there their everyday lives as well as in scientific research?
is more to GIS than rote pushing of buttons. GIScience is the Finally, significant progress has been made in the past
science behind the systems, in other words the scientific 14 years in understanding more about the world we are
knowledge on which GIS is based. That would include, for trying to represent. The knowledge represented by
example, the various indexing schemes that have been dis- Tobler’s First Law of Geography (Tobler 1970), for exam-
covered through research and implemented to improve the ple, is essential if systems are to be designed to function
performance of GIS or the algorithms that provide solutions effectively and efficiently. The law states that ‘nearby things
to problems such as polygon overlay or the finding of a are more similar than distant things’, and this simple gen-
shortest path. GIScience can also be defined as the set of eralization ensures that we can confidently interpolate con-
fundamental issues raised by the technology or the critical tinuous surfaces from point observations and express
issues that arise when the technology is employed. These properties of areas as if they were uniform. At the same
would include accuracy and uncertainty, scale, and the time it creates substantial difficulties in applying standard
methods used to capture the infinite complexity of the real statistical methods and tests to geographic information.
world in binary digits. Anselin (1989) identified this property, generally known
 Annals of GIS 7

as spatial dependence, along with statistical non-stationarity Earth. The technology to capture the internal three-
or heterogeneity, as the two properties that more than any dimensional structure of buildings is much less advanced,
others ‘make spatial special’. however, despite the importance of such information in
building management, wayfinding, and warfare.
One solution to this problem is to make use of the digital
4. Looking forward models that are now a universal part of the architectural
Prophesying about the future is of course enormously dan- design process. The field of building information manage-
gerous, but nevertheless there seem to be several things one ment (BIM) has adopted a series of standards, and these
can predict with some confidence about the geographic have been effectively interfaced with GIS through projects
information technologies of the future – if not 50 or even such as CityGML (http://www.citygml.org/). BIM can be
20 years ahead, then perhaps 5 or 10. In this section I very rich but is unfortunately available for only recently
speculate about five developments, each of which is on or constructed buildings.
only slightly over the current horizon. Research is still needed on the appropriate ways to
represent three-dimensional structures – in effect, building
ontology – in order to satisfy the various applications of
4.1. Knowing where everything is three-dimensional representations. Many approaches make
The positioning technologies discussed earlier – GPS and assumptions, such as vertical walls and right-angle corners,
RFID – are already widely used and suggest that we need to that are valid only for certain cultures. Modeling the move-
anticipate a world in which it will be possible to know where ment of individuals during a building evacuation, one
everything is, at all times. Clearly this does not mean that we obvious and important application, requires a form of repre-
will ever know the location of every molecule, but there are sentation, analogous to the link/node structure of road-
already substantial domains over which this kind of knowl- network representations, that may be very different from
edge is at least partially available. For example, we already the representations required by other applications such as
know where every mobile phone is, provided it is turned on the work of architects or the construction industry.
and within range, and with the most recent phones we know At this point also there is also no consensus on the best
location based on GPS to better than 10 m. Extensive data- technology for determining position in complex three-
bases created by tracking large numbers of mobile phones dimensional structures. Experimental technologies are
have already been used in research projects, raising important available based on WiFi beacons, local extensions of GPS,
issues of privacy. We know the locations of a significant ultrasound, and lasers, but none has yet emerged as the
fraction of the vehicle fleet based on GPS, particularly trucks, dominant approach or the basis for standards.
and we know when vehicles carrying RFID-based passes Nevertheless one can be confident that substantial progress
travel through toll gates. In some European countries every will be made in this area in the next few years.
farm animal is RFID-tagged, as is a substantial fraction of the
goods moving through large US retail stores. Imagine, then,
the value of knowing the location of every potential victim of 4.3. The role of the citizen
a disaster, such as the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995 Section 3.1.2 has already identified the citizen as an impor-
or the Wenchuan earthquake of May 2008. Such knowledge tant and rapidly growing source of geographic data, and
would be immediately useful in the search and rescue effort, Section 3.1.3 has discussed the success of virtual globes and
provided sufficient assurances could be made to guarantee other Web-based mechanisms for improving the role of the
privacy. Similar comments might be made about knowing the citizen as a consumer of geographic information. In future,
real-time locations of rescue teams, or personnel and materiel then, it seems that the citizen will play an increasing role as
in a military context. both consumer and producer – a concept that is often termed
the GeoWeb (Scharl and Tochtermann 2007).
A growing research literature is devoted to this phenom-
4.2. The third spatial dimension enon (see, e.g., Elwood 2008). One key issue is whether
Comments have already been made about the two- there are limits, particularly in terms of themes. Substantial
dimensional, outdoor nature of our current geographic resources have already accumulated through voluntary
data and tools. Great progress has been made in recent efforts in describing places (e.g., Wikimapia) and in build-
years in automating the process of acquiring three- ing street databases (OpenStreetMap). But are these themes
dimensional data. Specially equipped vans, for example, particularly suited to voluntary effort and are there themes
can now be driven along city streets continuously capturing that are so advanced that citizens will likely never make
not only photographs but also three-dimensional structures substantive contributions? This issue is discussed in
using ground-based LiDAR. Detailed digital models have Goodchild (2009) and the paper concludes that the themes
been constructed for many of the world’s large cities and that appear most problematic are the result of prior condi-
made available through sites such as Microsoft Virtual tions and constraints, particularly economies of scale.
8 M.F. Goodchild

The author also concludes that if themes are rethought based today will never capture the imagination as much as one that
on well-defined use cases then there appear to be no effec- shows how the world is changing or is likely to change in
tive limits to what citizens can contribute, with sufficient the future. Great strides have been made in recent years in
guidance and appropriate protocols. Moreover citizens pos- addressing the dynamic aspects of geographic information,
sess one important advantage over experts: knowledge of, and today an abundance of sources are providing real-time
and access to, local ground truth. dynamic information about various aspects of the Earth’s
Two specific areas seem to present an especially com- surface. Live feeds of weather, traffic congestion, and the
pelling case for citizen participation in geographic informa- locations of public transit vehicles are already familiar to
tion production. First, recent disasters in areas well many Web users. Together, they are creating a world of
endowed with technology, such as recent wildfires in geographic information that is very different from the static,
California, have clearly demonstrated the value of citizen map-based world of the past.
participation in providing early warning and early damage In the future, I think we have to imagine the possibility
reports. Despite the risk of error or deliberate malfeasance, of a world of real-time geographic information. Even today
these mechanisms have the enormous advantage of speed. it is technically possible to imagine knowing the complete
Second, day-to-day familiarity with the local area makes the real-time state of the transportation system of a city, for
citizen a valuable source of information about changes, in example, including the locations and speeds of all vehicles,
street patterns for example. Such information is of great and the state of all roads and public transit routes. Similarly
value to the producers of street databases and many have we should imagine a future that is fully informed about the
already organized networks of citizens with appropriate state of human health, including the real-time progress of
equipment, such as GPS vehicle tracking devices. disease outbreaks.
These possibilities rely on the growth of networks of
sensors, at fixed points in the environment or carried on
4.4. Access to geographic information vehicles and pedestrians. In addition humans will act as
As noted earlier, the virtual globes and other Web mapping intelligent sensors of various properties of their environ-
services have brought the power of digital geographic infor- ment (Goodchild 2007), particularly the more subtle and
mation directly to the citizen in unprecedented ways. abstract properties that require human perception and intel-
Almost all of this information, however, concerns how the ligence, such as the sense of crowding or the sense of threat
world currently looks. In principle one could use similar to one’s person.
mechanisms to keep the public informed about how the
world will look, or perhaps more correctly might look, in
the future. Virtual globes would be a very powerful way of 5. Conclusion
sharing information about future scenarios, at both global Fourteen years ago I concluded that GIS had made enor-
and local scales. The impacts of community planning deci- mous progress over the preceding few years and that it was
sions, global economic recession, new diseases, or global by then accepted in a wide range of disciplines. Today we
environmental change could all be visualized through a have moved far beyond that point, to where geospatial data
single, easy-to-use portal, providing a direct connection and tools are familiar to virtually everyone on the well-
between the predictive work of scientists, the decisions of endowed side of the digital divide. Yet the ability to use
public officials, and the general public. these powerful tools effectively, and to avoid obvious mis-
Several technical issues stand in the way. All predictions takes, remains limited to a minority of what are sometimes
are necessarily uncertain, so it would be necessary to pro- called spatially aware professionals. At the same time GIS
vide clear and unmistakable visualizations of doubt, some- has become easier to use, and the fly-by that once required
thing that is still difficult even in the sophisticated the advanced skills of a GIS professional can now be gen-
environment of a GIS. There is uncertainty about whether erated by a child of 10. This has shifted the educational
the average citizen is capable of treating such information agenda, and the primary question is no longer ‘How to train
responsibly, and research is needed to address the question a GIS professional to use ArcGIS?’ but instead ‘In the world
of how such information should be presented and to whom. of Google Maps, what does everyone need to know?’ The
Virtual globes operate today on a strictly visual basis, pro- answer lies in the world of GIScience and in the issues of
viding information in a form that is as close as possible to representation and data modeling, uncertainty, scale, and
actual appearance, yet prediction would require an ability to visualization that continue to drive the research agenda.
visualize phenomena that are inherently abstract. That research agenda remains as rich as ever. While we
have made great progress over the past two decades, as
Section 3.2 showed, there is a large set of important pro-
4.5. A technology of dynamics blems that must be solved by research if the next generation
It has often been said that public policy is driven by change of geospatial technology is to succeed. It includes issues of
– that a technology that emphasizes how the world looks scaling, in dealing with exponentially increasing numbers
 Annals of GIS 9

of data sources and users. It includes the issues raised in Giles, J., 2005. Special report: internet encyclopedias go head to
Section 4 that must be addressed in anticipation of future head. Nature, 438, 900–901.
Goodchild, M. F., 1992. Geographical Information Science.
technology. The world of VGI would have been almost
International Journal of Geographical Information Systems,
inconceivable 14 years ago, as would the world of virtual 6 (1), 31–45.
globes, and many of their impacts were wholly unantici- Goodchild, M. F., 1995. Future directions for geographic informa-
pated. Issues of conflation are now in the forefront as we tion science. Geographic Information Sciences, 1, 1–7.
begin to address the issues raised by an abundance of Goodchild, M.F., 1998. The geolibrary. In: S. Carver, ed.,
Innovations in GIS 5. London: Taylor and Francis, 59–68.
potentially duplicative information.
Goodchild, M.F., 2007. Citizens as sensors: the world of volun-
Like the discipline of geography, GIS often becomes the teered geography. GeoJournal, 69 (4), 211–221.
technological glue that holds together the large groups of Goodchild, M.F., 2008. The use cases of digital earth. International
collaborators that seem to be required to solve many of the Journal of Digital Earth, 1 (1), 31–42.
complex problems of today. I ended the paper 14 years ago Goodchild, M.F., 2009. Neogeography and the nature of geo-
graphic expertise. Journal of Location Based Services, 3 (2),
with the comment that ‘The information sciences like
82–96.
GIScience can flourish along with this new way of doing Goodchild, M.F., Fu, P., and Rich, P., 2007. Sharing geographic
science, as the ability to handle, store, describe, exchange, information: an assessment of the geospatial one-stop.
and organize information becomes increasingly the key to Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97
solving our most pressing problems’. Fourteen years have (2), 249–265.
Goodchild, M.F., Yuan, M., and Cova, T.J., 2007. Towards a
produced very substantial progress on problems of intero-
general theory of geographic representation in GIS.
perability and shared ontologies now exist in many International Journal of Geographical Information Science,
domains. The comment remains true nevertheless, and 21 (3), 239–260.
today it would be almost inconceivable that a research Heuvelink, G.B.M., 1998. Error propagation in environmental
proposal would not pay attention to computational infra- modeling with GIS. London: Taylor and Francis.
Jensen, J.R., 2007. Remote sensing of the environment: an earth
structure. When the research concerns the surface or near-
resource perspective. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice
surface of the Earth, that infrastructure must of necessity be Hall.
grounded in GIScience. Kennedy, M., 2002. The global positioning system and GIS: an
introduction. New York: Taylor and Francis.
Longley, P.A., et al., 2005. Geographic information systems and
science. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley.
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