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Geographic Information Science: Defining the Field

In the last decade, Geographic Information Science has emerged as a focus of considerable academic attention. To some extent, it is the Earth’s New Science, just as Cognitive Science was the Mind’s New Science a decade or two earlier (Gardner, 1985). But it is not clear how deep or lasting the impact of GI Science will be, either on academia or on the GIS industry. Rather than following the success of Cognitive Science, GI Science could just as easily be the next Regional Science, a similar fusion of disciplines that peaked early and continues today mainly as an internally successful multidisciplinary field of relatively low influence on science, technology, or society. Worse yet, Geographic Information Science could largely be just a pretentious name for Geographic Information Systems, and not really a scientific or intellectual field at all. This paper seeks to explore these issues, and to lay out the intellectual scope of Geographic Information Science.