All Topics

The connections and interactions between GIS&T and society range in scale from institutions and business enterprises down to the individual level. Some fundamental drivers behind those interconnections are political, economic, legal, and cultural. Rapidly developing GI technology and infrastructures also generate various forms of public GIS practice as part of citizen science, VGI and social media. These activities provoke questions and critiques around governance, democracy, diversity, and ethics.

Topics in this Knowledge Area are listed thematically below. Existing topics are linked directly to either their original (2006) or revised entries; forthcoming, future topics are italicized. 

Law, Regulation, and Policy Governance and Agency
The Legal Regime Public Participation GIS
Location Privacy Professional & Practical Ethics of GIS&T
Mechanisms of Control of Geospatial Information Codes of Ethics for Geospatial Professionals
Legal Mechanisms for Sharing Geospatial Info Aggregation of Spatial Entities (with focus on Legislative Redistricting)
GIS&T for Equity and Social Justice Implications of Distributed GIS&T
  Citizen Science with GIS&T
Critical Perspectives GIS&T and Spatial Decision Support
Epistemological Critiques Mapping Spatial Justice for Marginal Societies
GIS and Critical Ethics GIS&T and Community Engagement (with focus on GISCorps)
Feminist Critiques of GIS Geospatial Participatory Modeling
Balancing Security & Open Access to Geospatial Data  

 

A B C E F G I L M P S T
GS-23 - Legal mechanisms for sharing geospatial information
  • Describe contracts, licenses, and other mechanisms for sharing geospatial data
  • Outline the terms of a licensing agreement with a local engineering consulting firm that a manager of a county government GIS office would employ if charged to recoup revenue through sale and licensure of county data
GS-03 - Liability
  • Describe the nature of tort law generally and nuisance law specifically
  • Describe strategies for managing liability risk, including disclaimers and data quality standards
  • Describe cases of liability claims associated with misuse of geospatial information, erroneous information, and loss of proprietary interests
  • Differentiate among contract liability, tort liability, and statutory liability
GS-04 - Location Privacy

How effective is this fence at keeping people, objects, or sensitive information inside or outside? Location Privacy is concerned with the claim of individuals to determine when, how, and to what extent information about themselves and their location is communicated to others. Privacy implications for spatial data are growing in importance with growing awareness of the value of geo-information and the advent of the Internet of Things, Cloud-Based GIS, and Location Based Services.  

In the rapidly changing landscape of GIS and public domain spatial data, issues of location privacy are more important now than ever before. Technological trailblazing tends to precede legal safeguards. The development of GIS tools and the work of the GIS&T research and user community have typically occurred at a much faster rate than the establishment of legislative frameworks governing the use of spatial data, including privacy concerns. Yet even in a collaborative environment that characterizes the GIS&T community, and despite progress made, the issue of location privacy is a particularly thorny one, occurring as it does at the intersection of geotechnology and society.