Abstract:
GIScience (geographic information science) is a scholarly discipline that addresses
fundamental issues surrounding the use of a variety of digital technologies to handle
geographic information; namely, information about places, activities, and phenomena on
and near the surface of the Earth that are stored in maps or images. GIScience includes
the existing technologies and research areas of GIS (geographic information systems or
GISystems), cartography (mapmaking), geodesy (measurement of the Earth itself),
surveying (measurement of natural and manmade features on the Earth; also called
geomatics in the U.S.), photogrammetry (measurement from photographs or images),
global positioning system or GPS (precise and accurate positioning on the Earth’s surface
aided by satellites), digital image processing (handling and analysis of image data),
remote sensing (observation of Earth from space or underwater), and quantitative spatial
analysis and modeling.
