Real-Time Space-Time Integration in GIScience and Geography - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 392

ignore and must struggle to work within and reconcile the profusion of its received
categories of time and space (Richardson 2011 ). Future time GIScience work is less
restricted, in the sense that its temporal and spatial constructs are not necessarily
constrained by past categories or practices and can more freely be structured as the
researcher or modeler wishes; its delineations of space or time need not be confined
to those of a world or a time that is, or already has, occurred.
The possibility of autonomous and continuous real-time space-time geographic
data creation, integration, and use as one encounters and travels through space is a
relatively new and thoroughly transformative development for geography, GIS, and
GIScience, as well as for science and society more broadly. The real-time interactive
GPS/GIS functionality at the core of this transformation is largely responsible for
the explosion of spatiotemporal 1 data being generated today, and is the underlying
breakthrough enabling many new geographic research initiatives and myriad real-
time space-time integrated geospatial applications in governments, businesses, and
society. As others in this forum on space-time integration will discuss past time in
the context of historical GIS, and the construction of future time for spatial modeling
and so forth, I will limit my observations in this essay to the concept of real-time
space-time integration in GIScience and geography.

21.2 Origins of Real-Time Space-Time Integration

in GIS and GIScience

By the mid 1980s, geographic information systems (GIS) had developed into very
useful cartographic tools for the computerized storage, manipulation, and graphic
display of multiple thematic layers of locational data and attribute information, as
well as some analytical functions. It greatly improved the efficiency of making and
updating maps, compared with non-digital processes. However, GIS alone was a
post facto system: its locational, feature, and attribute data were laboriously gathered
and then integrated within the system well after it was collected. GIS was not fused
with or interactive in real-time with the dynamic real world around it.
Similarly, GPS alone, while a significant development of the early 1980s,
provided location but not surrounding context. As Abler ( 1993 ) noted, “GPS
equipment will tell me where I am with great precision ::: But knowing precisely
where I am may not be very helpful. Location, no matter how precisely specified,

1 In what follows, spatial and spatiotemporal should be taken as including references to location
and also to time where appropriate. GPS refers also to new similar positioning systems providing
equivalent autonomous and accurate location and time. GIS refers to a broad range of geographic
database systems, including but not limited to commercial GIS products. GIScience refers to
research on the scientific and technological challenges associated with working with spatial
or spatiotemporal data, including philosophical, ethical and social considerations integral to
its practice. “Real-time” refers, as always when dealing with the electronic transmission and
processing of measurements, to “near real-time.”