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I What is Geographic Information

Science and Technology?

The Domain of GIS&T

Governments, militaries, commercial enterprises, and other interests rely on information about the land
and the location and characteristics of people and resources. For centuries, maps have served as the
primary mechanism for managing and communicating geospatial information. In the 1960s, computer-
ized geographic information systems (GIS) emerged as a means to manage and analyze such informa-
tion more efficiently and effectively. Since then, computing power has increased, data have become plen-
tiful, software has become easier to use, and the scope and complexity of questions that GIS is capa-
ble of addressing has expanded dramatically. GIS and related technologies are now widely used in gov-
ernment agencies, private businesses, citizens groups, and research institutions. As the demand for
these technologies has grown, and as their applications have diversified, the field concerned with the
development and use of these technologies has also evolved. Today, GIS software is only one compo-
nent of a broad domain that we refer to as Geographic Information Science & Technology (GIS&T),
which is composed of three interrelated sub-domains (Figure 1). (Some members of the GIS&T commu-
nity, as well as some important stakeholders, refer to the GIS&T field as simply “geospatial.”
Connotations of this term still vary widely, however. See section II below.)

One sub-domain is Geographic Information Science (GIScience). GIScience is a multidisciplinary

research enterprise that addresses the nature of geographic information and the application of geospa-
tial technologies to basic scientific questions (Goodchild, 1992). Based primarily in the discipline of
geography, but drawing upon insights and methods from philosophy, psychology, mathematics, statistics,
computer science, landscape architecture, and other fields, GIScientists produced much of the knowl-
edge represented in the ten knowledge areas that comprise the Body of Knowledge.

A second sub-domain is Geospatial Technology, the specialized set of information technologies that
handle georeferenced data. Geospatial technologies support a wide variety of uses, from data acquisition

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(e.g., aerial imaging, remote sensing, land surveying, and global navigation satellite systems), to data
storage and manipulation (e.g., GIS, image processing, and database management software), to data
analysis (e.g., software for statistical analysis and modeling) to display and output (e.g., geovisualization
software and imaging devices). GIScience and applications inform the development of geospatial tech-
nologies, but technology development requires contributions from information science and engineering.

The third sub-domain, Applications of GIS&T, includes the increasingly diverse uses of geospatial
technology in government, industry, and academia. A few examples include near real-time analysis of
service outages in electrical networks, applications in military intelligence and operations, homeland
defense planning and operations, facilities siting, environmental impact assessment, property tax and
land ownership records management, and truck route optimization for solid waste pickup in urban areas.
The number and variety of fields that apply geospatial technologies is suggested in Figure 1 by the stack
of “various application domains.”

Figure 1: The three sub-domains comprising the GIS&T domain, in relation to allied fields. Two-way relations
that are half-dashed represent asymmetrical contributions between allied fields.

The two-way connections depicted in Figure 1 between GIScience, geospatial technology, and applica-
tions are significant. Since the early days of GIS, technology users at the application level have chal-
lenged geospatial technology developers to provide theoretical solutions and effective tools to deal with
complex real-world problems. One example is the set of problems that requires the explicit incorporation

6 GIS&T Body of Knowledge

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of true volumetric and temporal components into traditional spatial analysis. Problem-induced feedbacks
represent an important complement to the traditional science→engineering→users chain.

In addition to the three sub-domains that comprise GIS&T, Figure 1 also depicts contributions to the sub-
domains by key allied fields, including philosophy, psychology, mathematics, statistics, computer sci-
ence, information science and technology, engineering, landscape architecture, and especially geogra-
phy. Conversely, GIS&T also has contributed to several of these associated fields (for example, the addi-
tions of spatial statistics, spatial econometrics, and geostatistics to the general field of statistics).

Unlike other information technology fields, including computer science and information science, there
has, until now, been no collective effort by a community of researchers and educators to specify a com-
prehensive body of knowledge that defines the GIS&T domain. The Body of Knowledge is an attempt to
fill that void. Like similar documents produced in allied fields, we expect that the GIS&T Body of
Knowledge will be revisited and revised in years to come.

GIS&T Body of Knowledge 7