Real-Time Space-Time Integration in GIScience and Geography - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 402

theory and its interaction with practice and applications in GIScience? How is theory
generated in GIScience? Are we over-privileging borrowed and brittle notions of
theory from other disciplines in GIScience? And, more simply, what are our key
theories, and in what ways do they serve or hinder innovation and discovery?
I would argue that the tendency to de-couple technologies and applications from
theory in GIScience has not served us well. Research which takes a closer look at
the ways in which science, technology, and applications-driven research interact in
the actual practice of GIScience, as has been done in many other sciences (Pickering
1995 ; Kuhn 1996 ) is long overdue.
We also need to examine past and potential future linkages and synergies among
public, private, and university real-time space time integration research. One can
argue that research and innovation in the private sector in this area is as advanced
as in the university, and has at times, especially earlier, outstripped research in
GIScience in the universities. After all, the term GIScience was not coined until
1992 (Goodchild 1992 , 2010 ), and a major focus of its early practice was to
describe and attempt to understand what had already happened in the development
of core GIS and geospatial technology functionality, and to begin to assemble it
as a science. This is and has been a worthwhile and necessary undertaking, and
those who engaged in this debate early on are to be commended. But it does raise
the question of how all of this early development actually happened, prior to a
formal GIScience that now aspires to guide it, and further, what drives what: the
GIScience or the GITechnology? How did the unnamed science work then, and how
does GIScience work now? What is its dynamic? What flows from what? Or is
the reciprocal interaction between the technology and the science actually the real
dynamic?
It is perhaps also time to examine current interactions and boundaries between
GIScience and geography in more detail. In what ways are these boundaries fixed
and rigid, or permeable and mobile? What does the intellectual trade across these
boundaries look like? Is the flow balanced or dependent, and in which direction?
Are the two fields diverging or converging?
Further, how does conceptual thinking as part of the iterative processes of
overcoming research obstacles generate innovation in GIScience? What social
structures of GIScience will best enable the next conceptual breakthroughs and the
new methods, and what social values will shape the future of our coupled scientific
and technological research program? And how do curiosity-driven research and
applications-aware research actually differ in practice and intersect as drivers of
GIScience, and how mutually exclusive are these categories? Current work in the
philosophy and history of science has much to offer our examination of these
questions. I suggest as a starting point the work of Andrew Pickering (e.g., 1995
The Mangle of Practice) , Helen Longino (e.g., 2002 The Fate of Knowledge ), and
Peter Galison (e.g., 2003 Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps ).
In closing, I would like to thank all of my colleagues within the geography
and GIScience communities who have contributed so constructively and critically
to research at the intersection of these fields, and in advance for our continued
discussions on these and related ideas in the future.