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DA-38 - GIS&T and Retail Business

Where should a retail business occur or locate within a region?  What would that trade area look like?  Should a retail expansion occur and how would that affect sales of other nearby existing locations?  Would a new retail location have the right demographic or socio-economic customer base to be profitable?  These are important questions for retailers to consider.  Within the evolving landscape of GIS, there is more geospatial data than ever before about the potential customer.  In retail, the application of maps and mapping technology is growing to include commercial real estate, logistics, and marketing to name a few.  There has been an increased momentum across commercial applications for geospatial technologies delivered in an easy to comprehend format for a variety of end users.  

DA-11 - GIS&T and the Digital Humanities

This entry reviews the use of GIS&T in the digital humanities and in the spatial humanities, highlighting opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations between GIScientists and humanities scholars, including in history, archeology, and literary studies. Challenges are highlighted as well, including epistemological and ontological differences between the spatial, abstract, and quantitative view of the world of GIS&T and GIScience and the humanities emphasis on place and qualitative methods. The potential of mixed methods to bring together different epistemological perspectives is discussed in this context. Scale is identified as a promising geographical framework for humanities research, both in its metaphorical aspects and as intended in cartography. Examples of the use of GIS&T and GIScience in the humanities are provided, including historical GIS, geohistorical gazetteers, archeology and GIS, and GIS in literary studies. The entry is framed historically, with reference to the work of Bakhtin, Braudel, and Hägerstrand, who are early influencers of the spatial turn in the humanities. Among the research directions briefly explored are the GIS of place, deep maps, and qualitative GIS, which exemplify how the collaboration between GIScience and the humanities can be strengthened.

KE-25 - GIS&T Education and Training

GIS education and training have their roots both in formal educational settings and in professional development.  Methods and approaches for teaching and learning about and with geospatial technologies have evolved in tight connection with the advances in the internet and personal computers.  The adoption and integration of GIS and related geospatial technologies into dozens of academic disciplines has led to a high demand for instruction that is targeted and timely, a combination that is challenging to meet consistently with diverse audiences and in diverse settings. Academic degrees, concentrations, minors, certificates, and numerous other programs abound within formal and informal education.

GS-27 - GIS&T for Equity and Social Justice

A geographic information system (GIS) can be used effectively for activities, programs, and analyses focused on equity and social justice (ESJ).  Many types of inequities exist in society, but race and space are key predictors of inequity. A key concept of social justice is that any person born into society, no matter where they were born or live, will have an equitable opportunity to achieve successful life outcomes and to thrive. Geographic information science and its technologies (GIS&T) provide powerful tools to analyze equity and social justice issues and help government agencies apply an equity lens to every aspect of their administration. Given the reliance on spatial data to represent and analyze matters of ESJ, the use of these tools is necessary, logical, and appropriate. Some types of analyses and mapping commonly used with ESJ programs require careful attention to how data are combined and represented, risking misleading or false conclusions otherwise. Such outcomes could build mistrust when trust is most needed. A GIS-supported lifecycle for ESJ is presented that includes stages of exploratory issue analysis, community feedback, pro-equity programs analysis, management monitoring and stakeholder awareness, program performance metrics, and effectiveness analysis.

DA-33 - GIS&T in Urban and Regional Planning

Professionals within the urban and regional planning domain have long utilized GIS&T to better understand cities through mapping urban data, representing new proposals, and conducting modeling and analysis to help address urban problems. These activities include spatial data collection and management, cartography, and a variety of applied spatial analysis techniques. Urban and regional planning has developed the sub-fields of planning support systems and Geodesign, both of which describe a combination of technologies and methods to incorporate GIS&T into collaborative planning contexts. In the coming years, shifting patterns of global urbanization, smart cities, and urban big data present emerging opportunities and challenges for urban planning professionals.

KE-24 - GIS&T Positions and Qualifications

Workforce needs tied to geospatial data continue to evolve.  Along with expansion in the absolute number of geospatial workers employed in the public and private sectors is greater diversity in the fields where their work has become important.  Together, these trends generate demand for new types of educational and professional development programs and opportunities. Colleges and universities have responded by offering structured academic programs ranging from minors and academic certificates to full GIS&T degrees.  Recent efforts also target experienced GIS&T professionals through technical certifications involving software applications and more comprehensive professional certifications designed to recognize knowledge, experience, and expertise.

KE-12 - GIS&T Project Planning and Management

GIS&T project planning and management falls under the broader category of project management (PM) in general and information technology (IT) PM in particular, providing a rich background and guidelines that are stewarded by associations and their certifications. The lifecycle of a project or its component phases involves a number of process groups involving a series of actions leading to a result that are sequenced in the following manner: initiating, planning, executing and controlling, and closing. Effective project planning and management requires understanding of its knowledge areas in the project management body of knowledge (PM BoK), which include integration, scope, time, cost, quality, human resource, communications, risk, procurement, and stakeholder management. Numerous tools and techniques are available to assist the project manager in planning, executing, and controlling these efforts, some of which are specific to GIS&T projects. The distinctiveness of GIS&T project planning and management lies in an understanding of the uniqueness, overlap and connections that exist between the PM BoK and the GIS&T BoK, both of which have achieved new levels of maturity in recent decades. 

AM-81 - GIS-Based Computational Modeling

GIS-based computational models are explored. While models vary immensely across disciplines and specialties, the focus is on models that simulate and forecast geographical systems and processes in time and space. The degree and means of integration of the many different models with GIS are covered, and the critical phases of modeling: design, implementation, calibration, sensitivity analysis, validation and error analysis are introduced. The use of models in simulations, an important purpose for implementing models within or outside of GIS, is discussed and the context of scenario-based planning explained. To conclude, a survey of model types is presented, with their application methods and some examples, and the goals of modeling are discussed.

AM-22 - Global Measures of Spatial Association

Spatial association broadly describes how the locations and values of samples or observations vary across space. Similarity in both the attribute values and locations of observations can be assessed using measures of spatial association based upon the first law of geography. In this entry, we focus on the measures of spatial autocorrelation that assess the degree of similarity between attribute values of nearby observations across the entire study region. These global measures assess spatial relationships with the combination of spatial proximity as captured in the spatial weights matrix and the attribute similarity as captured by variable covariance (i.e. Moran’s I) or squared difference (i.e. Geary’s C). For categorical data, the join count statistic provides a global measure of spatial association. Two visualization approaches for spatial autocorrelation measures include Moran scatterplots and variograms (also known as semi-variograms).

CP-23 - Google Earth Engine

Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a cloud-based platform for planetary scale geospatial data analysis and communication.  By placing more than 17 petabytes of earth science data and the tools needed to access, filter, perform, and export analyses in the same easy to use application, users are able to explore and scale up analyses in both space and time without any of the hassles traditionally encountered with big data analysis.  Constant development and refinement have propelled GEE into one of the most advanced and accessible cloud-based geospatial analysis platforms available, and the near real time data ingestion and interface flexibility means users can go from observation to presentation in a single window.

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