In this work we outline the vision of geographic information observatories, explain how and why GIScience would bene t from broadening its range to studies of the information universe (without necessarily relating it back to the physical universe), how our technology stack puts the GIScience community in a unique position to develop such observatories, and illustrate how these observatories would enable to ask new questions.
More than two decades ago Geographic Information Science was established as an interdisciplinary research eld and since then has signi cantly contributed to the growth and analysis of spatial data from a wide range of sources such as satellites, mobile devices, and even citizens as sensors. Within the last few years, the resulting geographic information universe has entered a phase of exponential growth and today data is available at an ever increasing spatial, temporal, and thematic resolution. Surprisingly, however, the nature, structure, and evolution of this information universe is poorly understood.
Historically, a majority of GIScience research has focused on the relationships between information models and the geographic phenomena they represent. Thus, for instance, researchers have developed methods to compute density surfaces from point observations that can be used as heatmaps for crime analysis, wildlife tracking, and so forth. Interestingly, however, there is a lack of research that expands GIScience towards empirical work on the structure of the geographic information universe itself.
A better understanding of this universe would yield new insights into how geo-information can be utilized, what drives the diversi cation and di usion of information, how and why information forms ecosystems, how technological changes will be re ected by the information universe, whether there are laws of information science, what spatiotemporal properties of memes are, and so forth. Such research would explicitly include both observational and experimental approaches to science.
In the following, we will argue for the need for geographic information observatories by motivating them in the historical development of GI research, point out existing trends, give examples, and outline challenges. 2
GIScience was established to study the concepts and theories that underlie
Geographic Information Systems and other related technologies and thereby allows
to ask more general and foundational questions and to explore topics such as
usability, uncertainty, knowledge representation, or even ethical questions
using scienti c methods instead of a purely engineering driven perspective [
With GIS and GIScience gaining visibility, the developed methods and tools were applied in other domains inducing archeology, economics, and health research. This led to a further broadening of the GIScience realm, namely the notion of spatial sciences. The key insight was that many scienti c domains require expertise in spatial aspects or study spaces that are closely related to geographic space. This gave birth to spatial centers such as spatial@UCSB that serve as nexus for researchers interested in spatial questions. Examples for involved domains include cognitive and brain sciences, religious studies, chemistry, the digital humanities, and so forth. Nonetheless, one could argue that GIScience and spatial science remain supporting sciences that deliver services to other disciplines. In many geography departments, GIScience and related disciplines are still categorized under labels such as methods, techniques, computation, and so forth.1 It is not widely recognized that GIScience is the information science perspective on geography and the geosciences. It is on the same level as physical and human geography. GIScience does not depend on other domains and branches (of geography) but is a (meta) science in its own right. This, of course, does not imply that GI researchers should not closely collaborate with their colleagues in physical and human geography, it just highlights that they have their own agenda as well.
Over the last years, there have been multiple attempts to overcome the
narrow perspective outlined above. For instance, Skupin and Fabrikant have
investigated spatialization methods for non-geographic information visualization
[
Models, and GIS as section name.
2 See http://cns.iu.edu/docs/research/10-Last.fm.pdf.
aspects of GI research. For example, Couclelis outlines an ontological
perspectives on geographic information layers and their semantic contraction [
The notion of a Web Science introduced by [
Unsurprisingly most existing realizations of such Web observatories make heavy use of space and time as fundamental ordering principles and thus rely on Web mapping, spatial analysis, etc., for their user interfaces and interactions. With respect to the used and envisioned technologies to integrate, display, analyze, and communicate data, those observatories share common ideas with CyberGIS, the Digital Earth, and spatial data infrastructures. So what would geographic information observatories look like, how would they di er from existing work, and why would they be of interest to the GIScience community?
Imagine an observatory that constantly monitors geographic information
from di erent sources and perspectives, using di erent types of media,
spanning multiple themes, attribute-dimensions, resolutions, etc. It would ingest data
from a variety of sources including social media, governments, news portals, and
Internet tra c statistics. Such an observatory would allow us to ask questions
such as whether certain media types and contents show di erent dispersion
patterns, how do new technologies such as Google Glass impact the availability of
information and add new perspectives, how does the appearance of
information items in relation to speci c places forecast events, and whether there are
laws of information science such as the relation between the amount of schema
knowledge versus instance-level data [
Additionally, it could provide answers to such questions as how and why
geodata and technologies are socially embedded, what types of spatialization
techniques are most suitable for non-geographic data, what features of unstructured
information are most geo-indicative, what is the typical degree-of-separation
between various categories of information items and information items about
locations and places, how fast is geo-data growing in comparison with other data,
how do privacy concerns relate to changes in the resolution of available geo-data,
and so on. It is worth noting that a large-scale system such as the information
universe has emergent properties that can neither be studied nor predicted by
merely analyzing isolated technical and social e ects [
The envisioned GI observatories are more than just a rebranding of the Digital Earth or CyberGIS visions. In analogy to observatories in astronomy, oceanography, or volcanology, these GI observatories would form a network of interconnected installations that are open to researchers and the public, and that constantly monitor the information universe at a resolution that would be impossible to achieve for the individual researcher of citizen due to the required hardware and data processing capabilities. Similar to observatories in astronomy, they would have individual 'sensors' and specialize on di erent domains, i.e., they would monitor di erent types of signals. In case of interesting events multiple observatories could be targeted at speci c regions of the information universe (that may correspond to regions on the surface of the earth). GI observatories would not merely monitor the information universe but would make the full range of spatial analysis and geo-visualization methods publicly available. Thanks to GIScience's active role in elds such as Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), CyberGIS, semantics, geo-visualization, spatialization, etc., our community is in a great position to lead such e ort. To give a concrete example, multiple GI observatories could monitor social media, news, government data, tra c data, the ow of money, etc, during the 2014 Ukraine con ict and highlight di erent perspectives on the topic.
From an educational perspective, such observatories are not limited to Cloudbased environments but could actually be physical installations that citizens can visit. This would hopefully lead to a similar kind of visibility, fascination, and public support that we see in the eld of astronomy that make people support heavy nancial investments for the sake of expanding the frontiers of our knowledge and understanding. In the 21st century, the information universe is equally important as the physical universe.
There are, of course, many interesting challenges that have to be address in order to develop and make use of such GI observatories. In addition to further work on data integration, big geo-data analysis, work ow composition, scalability, uncertainty, spatialization, and so forth, the complex interaction and dynamics between technology, information, and society raises entirely new questions. One of these questions is geo-privacy. While it has been studied before, we are only now beginning to realize what it means that trash bins track our location and movement through cities3, that geo-information is increasingly stored and not forgotten, and that the new spatial, temporal, and thematic resolutions of the data may change human society forever.