Michael Goodchild

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · Department of Geography

Urban informatics appears to be a suitable area for the application of digital twins. Definitions of the term share some characteristics, but these definitions do not agree on what exactly constitutes a digital twin. The term has the potential to be misleading unless adequate attention is paid to the inherent uncertainty in any replica of a real sy...

Geographic location plays a crucial role in many aspects of research about the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet measurement of geographic location is necessarily imperfect, providing one of many sources of uncertainty in geospatial analysis. The ecological fallacy and the modifiable areal unit problem may lead to false inferences from such analysis. Spatial...

The specialization of different urban sectors, theories, and technologies and their confluence in city development have led to a greatly accelerated growth in urban informatics, the transdisciplinary field for understanding and developing the city through new information technologies. While this young and highly promising field has attracted multip...

Big Data provides a significant challenge to the practices that have evolved based on traditional sources of urban data. The variety of Big Data raises questions of integration, whether based on space and time or on individual identity. Uncertainty impinges in many ways on Big Data and on methods of data integration, and the goals of data integrati...

Geographic information in the form of maps and text and increasingly of digital data has always played a fundamental role in the discipline of geography. The chapter provides a brief outline of the history of GIS, including the role played by a commission of the IGU. Significant events in its development are discussed, including the social critique...

Replicability takes on special meaning when researching phenomena that are embedded in space and time, including phenomena distributed on the surface and near surface of the Earth. Two principles, spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity, are generally characteristic of such phenomena. Various practices have evolved in dealing with spatial hete...

Water resources refer to surface waters that flow across the land and groundwater that percolates beneath the surface, which are subject to various types of human activities and hydrological management (i.e., human measurement, use, modification, and control). Key hydrologic processes in the water cycle include precipitation as snow and rain, inter...

Urban informatics is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding, managing, and designing the city using systematic theories and methods based on new information technologies. Integrating urban science, geomatics, and informatics, urban informatics is a particularly timely way of fusing many interdisciplinary perspectives in studying city system...

This chapter provides a brief introduction to Part IV of the book and its focus on urban big data infrastructure. Eight chapters (Chaps. 31 to 38) explore the various dimensions of the topic, ranging from massive archives of 3D data and the Internet of Things to spatial search and the social issues of privacy that are raised by big geospatial data.

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function m...

This introduction provides a brief review of the motivation, background, and context of the Forum. It explains the roles of the six papers in the Forum and the importance of reproducibility and replicability across the broad sweep of contemporary geographic research.

Modern science, technology, and politics are all permeated by data that comes from people, measurements, or computational processes. While this data is often incomplete, corrupt, or lacking in sufficient accuracy and precision, explicit consideration of uncertainty is rarely part of the computational and decision making pipeline. The CCC Workshop o...

Comprehensively covers all Digital Earth-relevant technologies. Discusses how Digital Earth can be used to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Examines national and regional responses to the Digital Earth initiative. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-32-9915-3

Many visions for geospatial technology have been advanced over the past half century. Initially researchers saw the handling of geospatial data as the major problem to be overcome. The vision of geographic information systems arose as an early international consensus. Later visions included spatial data infrastructure, Digital Earth, and a nervous...

The previous 25 chapters introduced relevant technologies, applications, and other topics related to Digital Earth. Respective challenges and future research were also proposed by various authors. In this concluding chapter, we briefly review Digital Earth past and present, followed by a set of challenges and future trends, speculating on how Digit...

The previous 25 chapters introduced relevant technologies, applications, and other topics related to Digital Earth. Respective challenges and future research were also proposed by various authors. In this concluding chapter, we briefly review Digital Earth past and present, followed by a set of challenges and future trends, speculating on how Digit...

GISystems have strong and longstanding roots in Geography, stemming from early developments in the 1960s and 1970s that defined a first phase of their relationship. But as the uses and sophistication of geospatial technology have grown and spread across virtually all areas of the academy, reducing Geography's claim to ownership, that relationship t...

In this article, four geographers who are also GIS practitioners critique “Evaluating the Geographic in GIS.” Sparked by the arguments in that article, they pose fundamental questions about how geography can best contribute to GIS practices. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Geographic information science and systems (GIS) have undergone rapid growth during the past several decades. This growing trend seems likely to persist into the foreseeable future driven by numerous diverse applications and enabled by steady progress of related technologies. As a geospatial data deluge permeates broad scientific and societal realm...

An increasingly rich array of geographic information, such as real-time sensor data, public web pages, social media data, and dynamic maps, are available over the Internet tobe integrated by multiple geographic information science (GIScience) applications that were not possible in the past. The conventional tightly coupled development approach is n...

This chapter introduces a CyberGIS solution that aims at resolving the big data challenges in the discovery, search, visualization and interoperability of geospatial data. We describe a service-oriented architecture to make heterogeneous geospatial resources easily sharable and interoperable. OGC standards for sharing vector data, raster data, sens...

This book elucidates how cyberGIS (that is, new-generation geographic information science and systems (GIS) based on advanced computing and cyberinfrastructure) transforms computation- and data-intensive geospatial discovery and innovation. It comprehensively addresses opportunities and challenges, roadmaps for research and development, and major p...

Perhaps one of the mostly hotly debated topics in recent years has been the question of "GIS and Big Data". Much of the discussion has been about the data: huge volumes of 2D and 3D spatial data and spatio-temporal data are now being collected and stored; so how they can be accessed? and how can we map and interpret massive datasets in an effective...

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-...

In the digital era, “geographic information” has emerged as a primary intermediary in two-way communications between territories and maps. Correspondingly, we argue that the “territory as the source of the map” and the “map as the source of the territory” have become fundamental features of scientific study, spatial planning, and public communicati...

Geographers have long sought to understand and explain geographic phenomena through their dependence on the properties of site and situation. Yet the characterization of situation or context is fraught with numerous forms of uncertainty, related to data, the selection of situation variables, the geographic scale and extent of context, and the conce...

Fifty years after the initial efforts that coalesced as geographic information system (GIS), it is possible to look back and ask whether the decisions made then are still viable. Those decisions were constrained by the computing environment of the time, which was extremely primitive compared to today’s. The Canada Geographic Information System is u...

Big Geodata are voluminous, near-real-time, and obtained from a variety of sources. Interest in Big Geodata derives in part from current interest in related topics, including the Fourth Paradigm, open data and software, and the changing nature of science. Some of its impacts are disruptive, including the accelerating rate of publication and the lif...

There is genuine confusion and misunderstanding about the term " methodologies " among and beyond feminists. A search of the term yields definitions that range through vague (" general research strategy, " " the design process for carrying out research ") to inadequate (" the study of methods "), the latter equating methodology with techniques for...

The environment and gender debate has transformed significantly over the past forty years, contributing important insights to wider social science debates of environment–society questions along the way. This entry traces the history of thinking on environment and gender from 1970s ecofeminism through historical materialist contributions and the cur...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tgis.12242/full This is the editorial associated with a special issue in TGIS on 'Role of Volunteered Geographic Information in Advancing Science'. All papers are available already in 'early view', the compiled volume will be published in print in early 2017.

Description This is a festschrift including nine scientific papers and six abstracts of papers written by Dr. Gerard Rushton or his former graduate students and colleagues to celebrate his retirement from teaching at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA. The festschrift begins with Rushton’s own review of his research advances in Behavioral...

Many techniques have been proposed for visualizing uncertainty in geospatial data. Previous empirical research on the effectiveness of visualizations of geospatial uncertainty has focused primarily on user intuitions rather than objective measures of performance when reasoning under uncertainty. Framed in the context of Google’s blue dot, we examin...

Digital elevation models (DEMs) represent the Earth’s topography and support a variety of applications, ranging from extracting watershed drainage structure to measuring glacier volume. Applications that require conflation of multiple DEMs are problematic, however, because of misregistration. We explore a spatial optimization technique to quantify...

The context for geographic research has shifted from a data-scarce to a data-rich environment, in which the most fundamental changes are not just the volume of data, but the variety and the velocity at which we can capture georeferenced data; trends often associated with the concept of Big Data. A data-driven geography may be emerging in response t...

In principle, scientific knowledge is universal, and the methods of science similarly pay no attention to national boundaries, languages, or cultures. In practice, of course, these assertions are far from true, and great differences exist in how science is conceived and practiced around the world. Nowhere is this more true than in comparing scienti...

Downloading CGFinal.zip will provide copies of all animations, figures, and text from the article.

Space and place represent alternative ways of addressing the geographic world, the first based on geometry, coordinates and precise measurement, and the second based on place-names and their associations. While the spatial is a useful perspective for many forms of analysis of health data, only the platial perspective is able to inform the geographi...

Two meetings held in the early 1990s helped to bring about a rapprochement between the critics and proponents of GIS, and to focus research activities in what became known as critical GIScience. The motivations and conclusions of both meetings are reviewed. Since then development in GIS has been rapid, and has branched out in many new directions th...

Since the launch of the first land-observation satellite (Landsat-1) in 1972, land-cover mapping has accumulated a wide range of knowledge in the peer-reviewed literature. However, this knowledge has never been comprehensively analysed for new discoveries. Here, we developed the first spatialized database of scientific literature in English about l...

The p-compact-regions problem involves the search for an aggregation of n atomic spatial units into p-compact, contiguous regions. This article reports our efforts in designing a heuristic framework-MERGE (memory-based randomized greedy and edge reassignment)-to solve this problem through phases of dealing, randomized greedy, and edge reassignment....

This chapter begins with definitions of geographic information science (GIScience), of geocomputation, and of spatial analysis. We then discuss how these research areas have been influenced by recent developments in computing and data-intensive analysis, before setting out their core organizing principles from a practical perspective. The following...

Models of spatial transition probabilities, or equivalently, transiogram models have been recently proposed as spatial continuity measures in categorical fields. In this paper, properties of transiogram models are examined analytically, and three important findings are reported. Firstly, connections between the behaviors of auto-transiogram models...

Big data is distinguished by volume, velocity, and variety. A large proportion of all big data is likely to be geographically referenced, and much may be real time. While examples can be found of high-quality big data, problems arise in meeting the normal scientific standards of replicability and rigorous sampling. These standards can be relaxed in...

This article describes a high-resolution land cover data set for Spain and its application to dasymetric population mapping at census tract level. Eventually, this vector layer is transformed into a grid format. The work parallels the effort of the Joint ...

CyberGIS – defined as cyberinfrastructure-based geographic information systems GIS – has emerged as a new generation of GIS representing an important research direction for both cyberinfrastructure and geographic information science. This study introduces a 5-year effort funded by the US National Science Foundation to advance the science and applic...

Space and time frame all aspects of the discipline of geography. Integration is normally interpreted by geographers as a straddling of the environmental–social divide, but a more profound interpretation stresses the issues involved in coupling environmental and social processes: a science of integration rather than an integration of sciences. Seven...

GIS research has matured enormously in the 20 years since the GISRUK series began in 1993. Many new topics have been added to the research agenda, while others have moved out of the agenda either because they have been solved or because they are no longer as relevant. New developments continue to arrive, in the form of new data sources, new technol...

Current desktop-GIS software cannot answer users' spatial questions directly. The GIS functionality is hard to identify and use without specific training of GIS skills because of the complex hierarchical organization and the gap between users' spatial thinking and systems' implement descriptions. In order to bridge this gap, we propose a semantic f...

Geospatial data that were once difficult to obtain are now readily available to the public with the development of geospatial technologies. The ubiquitous use of social networking and location-based services enables easy sharing of personal stories among many people. With or without awareness of location disclosure, some users reveal a considerable...

Urban economic modeling and effective spatial planning are critical tools towards achieving urban sustainability. However, in practice, many technical obstacles, such as information islands, poor documentation of data and lack of software platforms to facilitate virtual collaboration, are challenging the effectiveness of decision-making processes....

This paper presents a new error band model, the statistical simulation error model, for describing the positional error of line features by incorporating both analytical and simulation methods. In this study, line features include line segments, polylines, and polygons. In existing error models, an infinite number of points on the line segment are...

Developments in geographic science and technology can increase our understanding of disease prevalence, etiology, transmission, and treatment.

Online social networking and information sharing services have generated large volumes of spatio-temporal footprints, which are potentially a valuable source of knowledge about the physical environment and social phenomena. However, it is critical to take into consideration the uneven distribution of the data generated in social media in order to u...

The phenomenon of volunteered geographic information is part of a profound transformation on how geographic data, information, and Knowledge are produced and circulated. This chapter begins by situating this transition within the broader context of an exaflood of digital data growth. It considers the implications of VGI and the exaflood for further...

The phenomenon of volunteered geographic information is part of a profound transformation in how geographic data, information, and knowledge are produced and circulated. By situating volunteered geographic information (VGI) in the context of big-data deluge and the data-intensive inquiry, the 20 chapters in this book explore both the theories and a...

Identifying location-based information from the WWW, such as street addresses of emergency service facilities, has become increasingly popular. However, current Web-mining tools such as Google’s crawler are designed to index webpages on the Internet instead of considering location information with a smaller granularity as an indexable object. This...

Place is an essential concept in human discourse. It is people's interaction and experience with their surroundings that identify place from non-place in space. This paper explores the use of spatial footprints as a record of human interaction with the environment. Specifically, we use geotagged photos collected in Flickr to provide a collective vi...

The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) was established in the late 1990s as a response to several perceived problems of traditional map libraries, notably access and organization. By 1999 it had evolved into an operational digital library, offering a well-defined set of services to a broad user community, based on an extensive collection of georefere...

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit and a popular example of user-generated content that includes volunteered geographic information (VGI). In this article, we present three main contributions: (1) a spatial data model and collection methods to study VGI in systems that may not explicitly support geographic data; (2) quantitative...

Geodesign will be more successful if its foundational terms, concepts, and models are shared, allowing all practitioners to understand each other clearly. Ontology has become the commonly accepted term for such foundations; accordingly, this paper describes efforts of the SDS Consortium to sponsor, foster, and develop a common ontology for geodesig...

A speech of then-Vice President Al Gore in 1998 created a vision for a Digital Earth, and played a role in stimulating the development of a first generation of virtual globes, typified by Google Earth, that achieved many but not all the elements of this vision. The technical achievements of Google Earth, and the functionality of this first generati...

The concept of Digital Earth as a digital replica of the planet has its roots in science fiction, in the writings of environmental visionaries, and in a speech prepared for delivery by Vice President Gore in 1998. Five use cases are identified that together comprise the vision of Digital Earth: a geoportal, a visualization service, a platform for s...

Numerous systems and tools have been developed for spatial decision support (SDS), but they generally suffer from a lack of re-usability, inconsistent terminology, and weak conceptualization. We introduce a collaborative effort by the SDS Consortium to build a SDS knowledge portal. We present the formal representation of knowledge about SDS, the va...

The convergence of newly interactive Web-based technologies with growing practices of user-generated content disseminated on the Internet is generating a remarkable new form of geographic information. Citizens are using handheld devices to collect geographic information and contribute it to crowd-sourced data sets, using Web-based mapping interface...

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is a phenomenon of recent years, offering an alternative mechanism for the acquisition and compilation of geographic information. As such it offers substantial advantages, but suffers from a general lack of quality assurance. We discuss the issues involved in the determination of quality for geospatial data,...

This concluding chapter reflects on some of the core themes that crosscut the contributed chapters, and further outlines some of the stimulating and significant relationships between volunteered geographic information (VGI) and the discipline of geography. We argue that future progress in VGI research depends in large part on building strong linkag...

This paper reports our efforts to address the grand challenge of the Digital Earth vision in terms of intelligent data discovery from vast quantities of geo-referenced data. We propose an algorithm combining LSA and a Two-Tier Ranking (LSATTR) algorithm based on revised cosine similarity to build a more efficient search engine – Semantic Indexing a...

This position paper is the outcome of a brainstorming workshop organised by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) in Beijing in March 2011. It argues that the vision of Digital Earth (DE) put forward by Vice-President Al Gore 13 years ago needs to be re-evaluated in the light of the many developments in the fields of information techno...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Geographic Information Science, GIScience 2012, held in Columbus, OH, USA in September 2012. The 26 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. While the traditional research topics are well reflected in the papers, emerging top...

Lack of relevant information, particularly geospatial information, is one of the major challenges in emergency management. In the past few years, geospatial information created by volunteers and facilitated by social networks has become a promising data source in time-critical situations. This paper discusses the roles that social networks can play...

Geographic information science can be defined as the study of the fundamental issues of geographic information, and is often motivated by the need to improve geographic information technologies. One such issue concerns the design of the user interface, and the relationship between the tasks performed by the technologies on the one hand, and the con...