At the core of this revolution has been geographic information systems (GIS), an amalgamation of automated cartography, database theory, computer visualization, and geographic data processing. As GIS developed and broadened in scientific scope and application, GIScience arose and organizations developed to help the rise. An example is the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), a non-profit organization of universities and other research institutions dedicated to advancing our understanding of geographic processes and spatial relationships through improved theory, methods, technology, and data. UCGIS membership is open to all U.S. academic and research organizations that meet the criteria listed on the membership page of the UCGIS web site at www.ucgis.org.
Current UCGIS membership consists of 55 U.S. universities, four professional societies, and one federal government research laboratory. Member institutions have the opportunity to participate in reviewing and setting national research priorities in GIS and related specialties. The UCGIS Council consist of two voting delegates from each member institution. The Council along with the UCGIS Board of Directors sets all priorities and activities of UCGIS. As UCGIS proceeds with its mission of advancing our understanding of geographic processes and spatial relationships, the organization continues to grow. New members are added each year and the interest in the organization has expanded beyond academia to commercial companies and government agencies and beyond the U.S. boundaries to foreign universities and corporations. UCGIS has established an Affiliate Member category for such organizations which have the breadth and depth of GIScience required for membership.
Since its formation in 1995, UCGIS, through the delegates of its member institutions, has developed a list of ten research priorities or challenges. These ten challenges include spatial data acquisition and integration, distributed and mobile computing, geographic representation, cognition of geographic information, interoperability of geographic information, scale, spatial analysis and modeling in a GIS environment, the future of the spatial information infrastructure, uncertainty in geographic data and GIS-based analyses, and GIS and society. The ten priorities were distilled from initial submissions of over 80 separate topics. Research white papers were prepared by teams of scientists from UCGIS institutions. The white papers, originally prepared in 1997, were refined to current versions available now on the UCGIS web site (http://www.ucgis.org/research98.html). The priorities will be the topic of a forthcoming book to be published by John Wiley and Sons.
The field of GIScience is extremely dynamic. Research priorities change as a result of accomplishments in the field and frequently new opportunities become available. Because of this dynamic knowledge base, UCGIS developed a process to track “Emerging Themes in GIScience Research.” That process is implemented in two-year cycles with the potential to overlap cycles by one year. The process includes solicitation of emerging themes from member institutions, presentation and discussion of the themes at a plenary session at a UCGIS Council meeting, white paper preparation on selected themes, approval of the new research themes by the Council, specialist meetings on each research theme, and development of showcase projects on the research themes. UCGIS is currently at stage two of this process with seven themes submitted for consideration at the UCGIS Summer Assembly, June 21-24, at the Resort at the Mountain, east of Portland, Oregon.
The seven themes to be considered and the submitting researchers are:
- Public Participation GIS - Nancy Obermeyer, Indiana State University
- Geospatial Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery - May Yuan, University of Oklahoma
- Ontologies in GIS, Geospatial Ontology - Max Egenhofer, University of Maine, David Mark, State University of New York at Buffalo
- The Social Construction of GIS and GIScience - Francis Harvey, University of Kentucky and Nicholas Chrisman, University of Washington
- Visualization - Aileen Buckley, University of Oregon
- Analytical Cartography - Harold Moellering, Ohio State University
- Innovation and Integration Issues for Remotely-Acquired Information - George Hepner, American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
The UCGIS research agenda focuses not only on basic research in GIScience, as illustrated by the topics above, but also on application areas which intersect the basic topics. In the summer of 1999, UCGIS addressed this intersection directly with examination of seven application areas: crime analysis, risk assessment and response, transportation planning and monitoring, urban and regional planning, water resources, involving the public in solving community problems, and public health and human services. The UCGIS investigation of these application areas resulted in the preparation of white papers on each area. These white papers were published in the URISA Journal (Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring, 2000) and can be accessed on the Web here.
UCGIS is also establishing a forum for student involvement in GIScience research across the university member institutions. UCGIS provides travel funds for students from member institutions to attend the Summer Assembly and interact with faculty from universities across the country. Students are required to prepare papers and posters for presentation at the Assembly. Faculty discussants will interact with the students to provide comments and suggestions on the work presented. Students compete for the travel support provided by UCGIS by supplying an abstract of their work. The abstracts are evaluated by a team of UCGIS faculty from a variety of institutions with restrictions prohibiting a faculty member from evaluating abstracts from their own university. UCGIS also has a strong educational mission.
In future columns we will report on educational activities as well as track specific research themes and applications under examination by UCGIS.