Reitsma Response

Stephen A. Daire 8/03/2017
USC SSI 581: WA #5 Dr. Oda

Support and Dissent towards Major Arguments

Reitsma's (2013) article argues that geographic information science (GISc) is defined by the very philosophical and foundational arguments from which the larger system evolves and self-identifies. She enunciates GISc as a theoretical spatiotemporal representation and framework which is poly-epistemological in nature; bridging the gaps of hard and social sciences elements of induction, deduction, and abduction along with ethnography and critical social theory. She highlights Goodchild's (1992) demarcation as the transition from geographic information systems as an applicable tool within sciences to its own formative body of knowledge. She recognizes the change of the International Journal of Geographic Information Systems to International Journal of Geographic Information Science as a response to discourse within the field, not an attempt to reclassify it.
She notes the evolution of scientific philosophically from Aristotle to Bacon, then to Khun and Feyerabend. She moves to philosophically define GISc via Stamos (2007) consensus criteria for epistemic biological sciences values. These values being simplicity, predictive accuracy, fertility, coherence, unification, and testability. This work was completed due to a need for prestige, recognition, and the appropriate credence for the subject from outsiders in pseudo, anti, and traditional sciences.
She comments on a lack of inundation of the concept within the vanguards of older scientific fields, and the movement of new interdisciplinary researchers taking note of GISc merits and faults. Those faults stemming from the blurring of art-science-engineering as cartography-geodesy-photogrammetry which are frequently used concurrently. She determined a need for GISc practitioners, or spatial scientists, to disseminate information in a clarified degree to promote GISc continued growth for use by the public, governments, and the scientific community.
I agree with Reitsma's definition, and defense of GISc on several levels and I feel her use of a biological scheme is a fitting solution as other areas of computing science are also following lessons from biological mimicry. It begins to rectify past debates between the hard and social sciences. As computing power, processing, and data collection are outpacing the field determining key features of GISc are necessary to provide continuity of logic and theory as work continues.

Geographic Information Science

Geospatial scientists, or the Australian term, spatial scientists, utilize geographic information science. On my own terms, I define GISc as: the parsimony of theories and data towards previously determined models in the hard and social sciences, with the construction of new contingently evolvable, presciently harmonizing frameworks that ultimately reduce it to concrete spatiotemporal deductions. These deductions are reached through the framework of GIS, with research propagating in new algorithm and application development, and applied field testing. So far, they are represented as Tobler's Law, spatial heterogeneity and spatial dependence with more to be determined.
These deductions seek to determine relationships if intensity of occurrence of an event is equally distributed across the landscape (heterogeneity), or if intensity at one location influences the intensity at neighboring locations (dependency). These areas rely on sets of properties and clusters of epistemic values (where no one value is sufficient or deficient). They are based on their number and degree of employment, with spatiotemporal verification or dismissal occurring as a standard deviation of certainty, or uncertainty, which is then agreed upon by society over time.

Influence on Interpretations

This information was very new to me, I was uniformed of the history of GISc debates, and discussions prior to this article. It is a good pragmatic philosophical debate and certainly aims to rectify concerns of this science and others through redefining and defending their topics, results, and conclusions as legitimate forms of hypothesis testing. It deepened my understanding of geospatial science including the developmental progenitors of previous logical frameworks that it operates within GISc, which will lead to more deductive developments in the future.

References

Reitsma, F. 2013. Revisiting the 'Is GIScience a science?' debate (or quite possibly scientific gerrymandering). International Journal of Geographical Information Science 2: 211-221.
Goodchild, M. F. 1992. Geographical information science. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems 1: 31-45.
Stamos, D.N., 2007. Popper, laws, and the exclusion of biology from genuine science. Acta Biotheoretica, 55: 357–375.
Tobler, W.R. 1970. A computer movie simulating urban growth in the Detroit region. Economic Geography. 46: 234–240.
Tobler, W., 2004. On the first law of geography: a reply. Annals of Association of American Geographers. 94: 304–310.
Anselin, L. 1995. Local indicators of spatial association—LISA. Geographical Analysis 27(2): 93–115.
Anselin, L. 2005. Exploring Spatial Data with GeoDa TM: A Workbook. Geography.
Anselin, L. 2010. Thirty years of spatial econometrics. Papers in Regional Science 89(1): 3–25.
Fotheringham, A.S., C. Brunsdon, and M.E. Charlton. 2002. Geographically weighted regression: The analysis of spatially varying relationships. John Wiley & Sons.
2017 Spatial Heterogeneity: An Introduction to Spatial Heterogeneity. University of California, Santa Barbara.

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