Real-Time Space-Time Integration in GIScience and Geography - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 397

day-to-day real-time operations at most governmental agencies and large business
organizations. It has, for better or worse, changed the ways wars are waged and
military operations are carried out.
Another fault line created by the introduction of real-time space-time geogra-
phies is evident in the enormous broadening of participation in mapping and
geographic knowledge production to include directly in the mapping process the
actual subject matter experts themselves (e.g., the botanist, the environmental
scientist, the lineman, the archeologist, etc.), or community activists (participatory
GIS), human rights organizations, and most recently by ordinary citizens through
volunteered geographic information (VGI) and crowd-sourced geographies.

21.4 Trends and Research Challenges

The pace of real-time geographic data creation and it usage in consumer and
business applications is expected to accelerate in future years, resulting from
three interrelated trends that together constitute a convergence of opportunities for
new research (1) the explosion of real-time, spatiotemporal data from real-time
interactive GPS/GIS-enabled devices, often integrated with distributed environmen-
tal sensor systems, satellite remote sensing, and crowd sourcing; (2) continuous
advances in computing and mobile wireless technologies, Web service-oriented
architectures, and geospatial cyberinfrastructure; and (3) the development of more
sophisticated tools and methods for analyzing, modeling, and visualizing spatiotem-
poral data at scales ranging temporally from the everyday to the life course and
spatially from the microscale to the global (Richardson et al. 2011 ).
As spatiotemporal data and applications have become ubiquitously available, and
as the adoption of RTI GPS/GIS as a “geographic management system” has become
more pervasive in society in recent years, research agendas for real-time space-time
integration in geography and GIScience are also proliferating. 5 What follows below

5 A special 3-day Symposium focused on the research status, recent advances, and research needs
of space-time integration, modeling and analysis in geography and GIScience was organized
by the Association of American Geographers (AAG) for its Annual Meeting in Seattle, April
12-16, 2011. This major research Symposium built on momentum from an earlier space-time
analysis workshop co-sponsored by the AAG, Esri, the University of Redlands, and the University
of Southern California in February of 2010. Research agendas presented here draw in part on
collaborative activities undertaken by the author during these symposia and workshops. The
space-time integration research presented at the AAG Symposium has generated, as intended,
many ongoing outcomes. These include books, workshops, journal special issues, NSF and NIH
research proposals, and this space-time forum in the Annals of the Association of American
Geographers , which provides perspectives from each of the plenary speakers at the AAG Space-
Time Symposium.
Space-time integration has of course long been the topic of study and speculation in geography
and beyond. A great deal of productive research has been undertaken generally on space-time
relationships in GIS and GIScience, with a few leading examples including Worboys ( 2005 ),