Perspectives on Space and Time in US and Chinese Science - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 10

Some of the earliest US applications of GIS were in resources management,
especially in the forestry industry, where it is used to manage and plan the growth
and exploitation of timber. GIS is now extensively used in planning, landscape
architecture, and other disciplines that adopt an interventionist stance, applying
science to the design, modification, and hopefully improvement of the geographic
domain. Recently the term geodesign has come to be associated with this perspective
(Steinitz 2012 ), which is exclusively neither idiographic nor nomothetic, but closer
to the activist ideals of the 1970s critics of scientific geography.
GIS has also done much to increase the scientific community's interest in space
and time, by making it much easier to study phenomena within a spatiotemporal
framework (Liang et al. 2010 ). In epidemiology, for example, it is now much easier
to make maps of rates of disease, to identify places where rates are anomalous, and
to access other information about those places and their surroundings. Maps have
been used to link rates of certain cancers to exposure to certain carcinogens, for
example. A map (and a GIS) is now much more likely to be seen as an essential
tool in any of the disciplines dealing with phenomena distributed over the surface of
the Earth. Yet substantial skepticism remains. Some years ago one of the authors
was engaged in conversation by a well-known US economist, who argued that
the explanatory power of location, in the form of latitude and longitude, was no
greater than that provided by any pair of socially significant variables, such as
income and level of education. But this argument misses an essential point - that
it is not latitude and longitude per se that explain (although causal arguments can
sometimes be made, especially for latitude). Instead properties derived from latitude
and longitude, such as distance, are more explanatory, and latitude and longitude
provide the essential links needed to establish context, and to show how phenomena
can be explained by what is near in space and time. Clearly similar explanatory
arguments cannot be made for what is near in income and education .

2.2.2 New Data Sources and New Questions

The original motivation for GIS was the map, and the need to perform various
functions on its contents. But the contents of a map are often highly synthesized and
compressed versions of original observations. A topographic map, for example, is a
synthesis of perhaps millions of observations of ground elevation and the positions
of identified features. A printed map is also very selective in its contents, focusing
on the more stable and persistent phenomena of the Earth's surface and avoiding the
transitory, in order to be valid for as long as possible after printing (Goodchild et al.
2007 ).
Technical developments over the past few decades, many of them in the US, have
brought profound changes to the nature of maps and the availability of geographic
information. Instead of being exclusively the preserve of experts, maps can now
be made by anyone using readily available data and software, at very little cost.
Maps can be made of real-time traffic conditions, the locations of aircraft, or the