2022 QUARTER 03

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W
GS-11 - Professional and Practical Ethics of GIS&T

Geospatial technologies are often and rightly described as “powerful.” With power comes the ability to cause harm – intentionally or unintentionally - as well as to do good. In the context of GIS&T, Practical Ethics is the set of knowledge, skills and abilities needed to make reasoned decisions in light of the risks posed by geospatial technologies and methods in a wide variety of use cases. Ethics have been considered from different viewpoints in the GIS&T field. A practitioner's perspective may be based on a combination of "ordinary morality," institutional ethics policies, and professional ethics codes. By contrast, an academic scholar's perspective may be grounded in social or critical theory. What these perspectives have in common is reliance on reason to respond with integrity to ethical challenges. This entry focuses on the special obligations of GIS professionals, and on a method that educators can use to help students develop moral reasoning skills that GIS professionals need. The important related issues of Critical GIS and Spatial Law and Policy are to be considered elsewhere.  

KE-31 - Professional Certification

Professional Certification has been a part of the GIS enterprise for over two decades. There are several different certification programs and related activities now in operation within GIS, though there has been much debate over its merits, how it should be done and by whom. 

DC-01 - Professional Land Surveying

Professional Land Surveyors are the only profession that create the legal description of land parcels, which are then officially recorded to show ownership and rights pertaining to each and every land parcel within a jurisdiction. The Surveyor is skilled at undertaking the physical measurements that are needed to locate accurately land parcels on the ground and to write the unambiguous legal description of the land to create legal title in real estate. These land ownership records are critical for the transfer of ownership in the real estate market. The legal land description provided by Surveyors forms the foundation, and the real estate market provides the mechanism, for real estate to become the largest store of tangible wealth in any free market economy.

PD-29 - Programming of Mobile GIS Applications

Mobile technology has significantly changed how we communicate and interact with the outside world. With the increasing use of mobile devices and advancement of information communication information (ICT) technologies, mobile GIS emerged to provide real-time data collection and update, and made GIS easier and convenient to access. This entry introduces the concept, types, and general architecture of mobile GIS, key technologies used for mobile GIS development, and examples of mobile GIS applications.

GS-07 - Property regimes
  • Explain the legal concept “property regime”
  • Compare and contrast the U.S. federal government’s policy regarding rights to geospatial data with similar policies in other countries
  • Compare and contrast the consequences of different national policies about rights to geospatia data in terms of the real costs of spatial data, their coverage, accuracy, uncertainty, reliability, validity, and maintenance
  • Describe organizations’ and governments’ incentives to treat geospatial information as property
  • Outline arguments for and against the notion of information as a public good
  • Argue for and against the treatment of geospatial information as a commodity
FC-17 - Proximity and Distance Decay

Distance decay is an essential concept in geography. At its core, distance decay describes how the relationship between two entities generally gets weaker as the separation between them increases. Inspired by long-standing ideas in physics, the concept of distance decay is used by geographers to analyze two kinds of relationships. First, the term expresses how measured interactions (such as trade volume or migration flow) generally decrease as the separation between entities increases, as is analyzed by spatial interaction models. Second, the term is used to describe how the implicit similarity between observations changes with separation, as measured by variograms. For either type of relationship, we discuss how "separation" must be clearly articulated according to the mechanism of the relationship under study. In doing this, we suggest that separation need not refer to positions in space or time, but can involve social or behavioral perceptions of separation, too. To close, we present how the "death of distance" is transforming distance decay in uneven ways.

FC-29 - Public and Private Sector Origins
  • Identify some of the key federal agencies and programs that provided the impetus for the development of GIS&T
  • Explain how the federalization of land management in Canada led to the development of the Canadian Geographic Information System in the 1960s
  • Discuss the role of the U.S. Census Bureau in contributing to the development of the U.S. geospatial industry
  • Discuss the role of the U.S. Geological Survey in contributing to the development of the U.S. geospatial industry
  • Describe the mechanical and computerized technologies used by civilian and military mapping agencies between World War II and the advent of GIS
  • Trace the history of the relationship between the intelligence community and the geospatial industry
  • Compare and contrast the initiatives of various countries to move their national mapping activities to geospatial data
  • Describe the role of NASA and the Landsat program in promoting development of digital image processing and raster GIS systems
  • Identify some of the key commercial activities that provided an impetus for the development of GIS&T
  • Differentiate the dominant industries using geospatial technologies during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s
  • Describe the contributions of McHarg and other practitioners in developing geographic analysis methods later incorporated into GIS
  • Evaluate the correspondence between advances in hardware and operating system technology and changes in GIS software
  • Describe the influence of evolving computer hardware and of private sector hardware firms such as IBM on the emerging GIS software industry
  • Discuss the emergence of the GIS software industry in terms of technology evolution and markets served by firms such as ESRI, Intergraph, and ERDAS
GS-06 - Public participation GIS
  • Critique the assertion that public participation GIS promotes democracy
  • Explain how community organizations’ use of geospatial technologies can alter existing community power relations
  • Explain how geospatial technologies can assist community organizations at each rung of the ladder of public participation
  • Explain the challenge of representing within current GIS software local knowledge that is neither easily mapped nor verified
  • Discuss advantages and disadvantages of six models of GIS availability, including communitybased GIS, university-community partnerships, GIS facilities in universities and public libraries, “Map rooms,” Internet map servers, and neighborhood GIS centers.
  • Explain why some community organizations may encounter more difficulty than others in acquiring geospatial data from public and private organizations
GS-05 - Public participation in governing
  • Differentiate among universal/deliberative, pluralist/representative, and participatory models of citizen participation in governing
  • Defend or refute the argument that local knowledges are contested
  • Explain how community organizations represent the interests of citizens, politicians, and planners
  • Explain and respond to the assertion that “capturing local knowledge” can be exploitative
  • Describe an example of “local knowledge” that is unlikely to be represented in the geospatial data maintained routinely by government agencies
  • Explain how legislation such as the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 provides leverage to community organizations
  • Describe the range of spatial scales at which community organizations operate
  • Compare the advantages and disadvantages of group participation and individual participation
  • Describe the six “rungs” of increasing participation in governmental decision-making that constitute a “ladder” of public participation
KE-28 - Publications
  • Describe the leading academic journals serving the GIS&T community
  • Select association and for-profit journals that are useful to entities managing enterprise GISs
  • Select and describe the leading trade journals serving the GIS&T community
  • Develop a bibliography of scholarly and professional articles and/or books that are relevant to a particular GIS&T project

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