Thursday, February 26, 2015

Information and Communications Technology in my Field

Views on Geographic Information System (GIS) and Its Applications

Salvador T. Miranda, Jr.

A geographic information system (GIS) is a technological tool for comprehending geography and making intelligent decisions. GIS organizes geographic data so that a person reading a map can select data necessary for a specific project or task. A thematic map has a table of contents that allows the reader to add layers of information to a base map of real-world locations. A good GIS program is able to process geographic data from a variety of sources and integrate it into a map project. GIS maps are interactive. On the computer screen, map users can scan a GIS map in any direction, zoom in or out, and change the nature of the information contained in the map. They can choose whether to see the roads, how many roads to see, and how roads should be depicted. Then they can select what other items they wish to view alongside these roads such as storm drains, gas lines, rare plants, or hospitals. Some GIS programs are designed to perform sophisticated calculations for tracking storms or predicting erosion patterns. GIS applications can be embedded into common activities such as verifying an address. From routinely performing work-related tasks to scientifically exploring the complexities of our world, GIS gives people the geographic advantage to become more productive, more aware, and more responsive citizens of planet Earth (ESRI, 2014)
According to (Gethis, 2008), the tremendous response to GIS over the last 20 years did not happen by chance. As children, when we matured from being self-centered individuals to externally oriented people, we developed a strong sense of place and a strong curiosity about the world around us. The spatial point of view was latent within us. Educational theorists have always said that a spatial perspective exists among all normal people. GIS and all of its related techniques and methods have helped open our geographic door. Now we "see everything," manipulate it, overlay it, add to it, and make great prints of what we have created. One of the wonders of these discoveries and activities is that many of us earn our keep being professional spatialists. I use the word spatialists purposefully, because it is by virtually manipulating earth space that we have tweaked our natural tendency to develop our spatial cognitive abilities. "Spatial" has meaning to the extent that it is spatial concepts that hold us together and allow us to skip all the preliminaries and get right to our interactions with the earth, with maps, and with colleagues.
Exploration of our planet through fieldwork and, hence, discovery of new places is still on-going, but so is the exploration of environmental databases, even information spaces that do not necessarily include spatial data. Therefore, "discovery" of a place does not necessarily mean having to "be there" in the field. Under the umbrella of cyberinfrastructures, exciting new research topics are being developed in the areas of Web GIS (e.g., modeling, algorithms, data structures, stability, performance, and other computing issues), ontological libraries and semantic interoperability within Web GIS, and networks of data and metadata clearinghouses that are being built with open-specification Web mapping services and Web feature services. So in our quest to build a "digital earth"—global access to all possible geographic data about places on the surface and the subsurface—researchers and practitioners face many enticing challenges, including the development of visualization systems with user-friendly interfaces that enable the analysis, modeling, and simulation of data, as well as just the simple viewing of it (Wright, 2007).
Reality is dynamic. In fact, dynamics is so essential to reality that a static world is difficult to imagine. Space and time penetrate physical, biological, social, and humanistic inquiries. The accumulative nature of sensing and knowing our world arises through spatiotemporal experiences and interpretations. Some disciplines, such as geography and landscape ecology, emphasize the spatial dimension of world knowledge, and other disciplines, such as history and climatology, take time centric approaches to organize evidences of reality. However, it is the space-time integration that provides the explanatory power to understand and predict reality. In this article, I advocate for the concept of dynamics GIS to fundamentally rethink the role of geographic information science as a means to improve our understanding of reality and, through that understanding, to develop geographic information systems that enhance our ability to formulate interpretations, make informed decisions, and develop adaptation strategies for this ever-changing world. Before continuing, I would like to clarify my use of dynamics GIS instead of dynamic GIS. The emphasis refers to the fact that a GIS can represent, analyse, and model geographic dynamics, not that a GIS is dynamic. Several academic publications review the development of temporal GIS. Most research efforts emphasize the integration of temporal data into GIS databases. Change and movement are two fundamental elements in temporal GIS research. Temporal GIS research has prospered in many applications, such as map animation; change detection; movement tracking; and spatiotemporal clusters, simulation, and visualization. A later emphasis on processes and events set forth the basis for a dynamics GIS to reveal the causes or driving forces responsible for change and movement and the mechanisms by which the change or movement proceeds. After all, change and movement are observable elements of dynamics (Yuan, 2008).
In the world of GIS, we are still living out the original dreams of the 1960s. An institution would spend great time and effort to develop a geographic information system. Note that the term is singular. It implies one integrated system, a centralized one, built by experts to respond to specific needs. There is some vague hope that others will beat a path to the door of the big centralized system. If one of these users wants the data, they will be offered 1974 technology: a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to take a copy. FTP has survived virtually unchanged for more than 30 years. Now implemented as a Web-based portal under the disguise of a download, this looks modern and sophisticated, but it leads to the most horrible duplication and proliferation of unsynchronized data holdings. We have a worldwide communication network, but we are still managing it with some elements of the telegraph mentality of centralization. Somehow the official-looking professional presence of a clearinghouse inspires confidence, even if the business model fails to grasp how the world has changed. In the GIS community, the movement was fi rst heard under the title of Digital Earth—the idea that libraries of information could be referenced by location as a special kind of content index. The term also tied in a real-time camera pointed at the Earth from orbit. Although Al Gore did not invent the Internet, his name and office were used to validate the Digital Earth vision. The term geo web is perhaps a better term for the technical trick to search for content based on location. Certainly the emphasis on spatial search is the key to Google Earth and Microsoft'sVirtual Earth. Yet these initiatives miss the social side of networking. One of the key elements of the technology is the empowerment of citizens to produce their own spatial information, then to present it publicly. This overthrows the specialist model of the centralized model from decades past (Christman, 2007).


Bibliography

Christman, N. (2007). Living Inside Network of Knowledge. ARCNews Magazine, pp.25-30.
ESRI. (2014, December 1). Products, ArcGIS. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from http://www.esri.com/products/index.html
Gethis, A. (2008). Essays on Geography and GIS. ArcNews Magazine, pp. 3-4.
Wright, D. (2007). Exploration in the Age of Digital Earth. ARCNews Magazine, pp.9-16.

Yuan, M. (2008). Dynamics GIS:Recognizing the Dynamic Reality. ARCNews Magazine, pp.17-19.

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