ABSTRACT

Well before the turn of the new millennium, GIS communities in the broadest sense had begun building national spatial data infrastructures and coordinated digital representations of the Earth (Digital Earth), and researching their scientific, technological, industrial, and social impacts (Coppock and Rhind, 1991; Mapping Science Committee, 1993; Goodchild, 1999b). Unlike the earlier debates over vector-or raster-based data structuring, when computers were used for simple operations such as displaying and analysing digitised maps (Peuquet, 1984, 1988), these efforts represented a much more comprehensive need to address the many roles of GIS and geographical information in complex modern societies. More fundamental still is the philosophical and scientific evolution of GIS, for which issues such as data structures and numerical algorithms are seen as primarily technical and limited in scope.