Real-Time Space-Time Integration in GIScience and Geography - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 399

21.4.4 Transforming Geographic Data into Meaningful

Information

This is a central research challenge for all of GIScience. The key research question,
fundamentally, is how do increasing quantities of geographic data become fused into
meaningful information? Information is the rich relational context that dynamically
binds data together, provides much of its utility, and allows people to choose among
several otherwise indistinguishable courses of action (Abler and Richardson 2003 ).
The integrated GIS component of RTI GPS/GIS offers some potential pathways
forward, as the robust integrated data collected by these systems can be directly
integrated in real time in the field into previously structured GIS databases, designed
for specific tasks or for answering focused research questions. Essentially, the
extended GIS itself can provide much of the necessary external relational context,
not only about ones immediate surroundings, but also key related information
necessary to answer specified questions in real time in the field based on the
new real-time interactive GPS/GIS data being generated about events, places, and
processes as they are emerging, evolving and interacting in real-time across space.

21.4.5 Ethics, Human Rights and Human Subject Protection

GIScience is an international and interdisciplinary enterprise. Examining the
impacts of our research on others is a necessary component of research in our
field. Concepts of human subject protection vary greatly from country to country,
and also among academic disciplines. Examining fundamental human rights as a
broader foundation for examining human subject protection in a transdisciplinary
and transboundary field such as GIScience is a promising direction which demands
our attention and further research (Albro and Richardson 2012 ).

21.4.6 User Interfaces and Communications

We should integrate new wireless communications bandwidth, high speed Internet
options, and existing real-time GPS/GIS linkages to optimize dynamic background
map displays and database use on the fly, in order to enable current real-time, real-
world interactive systems and methods to incorporate change over very short time
periods into GIS databases. We should enhance real-time user interfaces to match
those available for computer games.