ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters, we have seen the way in which, for the greater part of its history, GIS development has tended to follow technological advances both in application fields and in other types of information system. This characteristic of GIS is mirrored in the conceptual and theoretical work which has appeared. These diverse application fields have tended to prevent the emergence of any general understanding of the way in which GIS represent the geographic ‘real world’ or of any discussion as to whose definition of the ‘real’ is most appropriate. The existing theoretical work may be characterized as addressing two main themes: (1) the ‘components of GIS’ and (2) the ‘fundamental operations of GIS’. However, when considered at a deeper level, these avenues of thought strongly reflect the technological roots of GIS development and fail to address the wider issues of spatial data handling and the GIS as a spatial data processing system. Goodchild (1987:327) noted, ‘to an outsider GIS research appears as a mass of relatively uncoordinated material with no core theory or organizing principles’, and although the research community is now more strongly organized, theoretical work is still relatively rare. At the start of the 1990s, Goodchild (1992:43) was still able to note that ‘few people have had the time to write the textbooks or to identify the intellectual core’. It is a measure of the inadequacy of the existing formulations that they offer no real assistance to the application of GIS techniques to socioeconomic data except as a checklist of possible software functions. This is because the concepts used, being essentially at the level of software description, do not offer any explanation at the more complex level of data representation.
