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Introduction
The late 1960's and early 1970's gave rise to a quantitative revolution in geography,
as labelled by Haggett and Chorley (1967). Computing became widely accessible as
a geographic tool, enabling a range of previously intractable problems to be
analysed. An excellent account of the somewhat turbulent history of that time is
given by Macmillan (1997). One interpretation of this period is that the computers
became the slaves of the quantitative geographers. Lots of (very messy) Fortran code
was written, lots of punched card stacks were dropped (or thrown) and some
respectable geographers joined the ranks of the bearded, nocturnal hackers that
haunted the 'machine room'. Geographers began to look for more data (because now
they could actually analyse it) and to build more complex models.
Disabling Technology
The late 1970's and early 1980's saw the rise of databases; large monolithic systems
that standardised on interfaces, file structures and query languages. Like all generic
solutions there was a cost flexibility and performance were sacrificed for
robustness and ease of application construction. Early GIS show evidence of these
same engineering compromises. GIS saw to it that geographers became the slaves of
the computer, having to adopt the impoverished representational and analysis
capabilities that GIS provided, in exchange for ditching the Fortran, getting some
sleep and producing much prettier output.
GIS was, for some, a backwards step because the data models and analysis methods
provided were simply not rich enough in geographical concepts and understanding to
meet their needs. (It is entirely possible that computer scientists invented GIS out of
spite, being fed up with all those quantitative geographers hogging their CPU cycles
and clogging up the disks with kilobytes(!) of data.) Consequently, many of the
geographical analysis problems that gave rise to the quantitative revolution in the
first place could not be addressed in these systems. Quantitative geographers
switched over to GIS or they went to the back of the research funding line.
In the intervening time, GIS have improved somewhat and geography has become
very much richer in digital information. The requirement to build complex
applications and simulations has not receded, if anything it has become more urgent,
with the need to plan for a changing climate, to feed an increasing population and to
provide pinpoint marketing analysis for digital encyclopaedia salespeople.
Enabling Technology
Knowledge discovery:
Visualisation:
Advances in visualisation as a means of data exploration are providing new tools and
approaches to help gain insight into complex and multi-dimensional datasets. Visual
portrayal can illicit understanding by adopting a representational form that is much
more readily assimilated by people than statistical summaries of correlation or
clustering. (e.g. GeoVista Center, Penn State Geography or Geography, Leicester).
Problems remain before this new technology is effectively harnessed. Many of these
are methodological; sophisticated tools require sophisticated set-up and operation.
Although there are many reported examples of the use of these tools in the earth
sciences literature, their use often incurs a considerable investment in terms of
customisation, set-up, experimentation and testing before useful results are obtained.
So, GeoComputation must overcome some significant challenges if the techniques
are to become established in the toolbox of the geographer. These challenges include:
2. the design of suitable geographic operators for data mining and knowledge
discovery
In short, there is a gap in knowledge between the abstract functioning of these tools
(which is usually well understood in the computer science community) and their
successful deployment to the complex applications and datasets that are
commonplace in geography. It is precisely this gap in knowledge that
GeoComputation aims to address.
Mark Gahegan,
Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, USA. Email:
mark@geog.psu.edu.
References