ABSTRACT
The geographic information systems (GIS) revolution that started in many countries in the mid-1980s is creating a wealth of spatial information in a large number of application areas. The post-GIS world of the 1990s is quite different from the computing and data environments in which many of the existing spatial analysis and modelling technologies were developed. A broader consensus about a set of GIS relevant spatial analysis methods is important for a number of strategic reasons. D. Benoit and G. P. Clarke provide an evaluation of the appropriateness and ease of use of spatial interaction models for retail analysis in proprietary GIS packages. The GIS toolkit consists of a set of generic, application-independent tools for data capture, storage, manipulation, mapping and analysis. Methods should be developed to be self-checking numerically and the basic rule of the user having to validate any really interesting results via independent data needs to become an established practice.
