Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
stimulating research and the growth of academic geography in North America will be
described and special emphasis will be invested in the development of the Core Curricu-
lum (both the original and the subsequent revised versions) in promoting the teaching of
GIS in North American Universities and indeed around the world. The subsequent role
of the original GIS Body of Knowledge (BoK 1.0) in furthering the development of the
discipline after the turn of the century will be described. The limitations of this approach
in that it lacked depth and represented a static, unchanging and unevolving view of the
discipline will be discussed. Current attempts to produce a GIS Body of Knowledge that
is dynamic, uses a wiki-like approach, involves new immersive media and a Webble
World philosophy to capture the ongoing growth and evolution of GIScience will be
considered along with speculations on the future of curricula within the discipline.
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The Origins of GIS
The history of Geographic Information Systems and Geographic Information Science
has been described by [15], [5], [40] and [41]. Geographic information has long been
highly valued and, in describing the history of the discipline, many GIS texts cite the
importance of military, geographic information, giving as an example the thematic
overlay maps of the French cartographer, Berthier, who used this device to show the
sequence of troop movements at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 during the American
War of Independence. Equally important in the history of GIS, during the subsequent
century, was the work of British physician, John Snow, in plotting a map of cholera
deaths in London in 1854. The concentration of the victims' residences around the
nearby, water pump in Broad Street and the cessation of the outbreak, following the
removal of the pump handle, allowed the water borne cause of the disease to be de-
termined for the first time.
The modern era of Geographic Information Science is generally considered to go
back to the 1950s [4]. Coppock and Rhind [5] split the first 40 years of GIS history
into four periods: 1) the Pioneer Era (1950s-1975); 2) the Government Supported,
Experimental Period (mid-1970s to early 1980s); 3) the Commercial Period (early
1980s to the start of the 1990s); 4) The User Dominance Era (from the 1990s on-
wards). For each of these periods the importance of conceptual developments, soft-
ware and hardware innovations, the influence of academia, commercial enterprises
and governments were examined. Here we will look primarily at the first three phases
of this history and then return to the story later in the paper.
Phase 1 included such conceptual developments as the map overlay or “layer cake”
approach which allowed the integration and the investigation of the influence of many
spatial variables. This approach was popularized by Ian McHarg in his book Design
with Nature [26]. Steinetz et al. [31] include a complete discussion of this methodolo-
gy and demonstrate convincingly that the original conceptual framework was the work
of Jacqueline Tyrwhitt whose essay in the Town and Country Textbook published by
the Architectural Press, London, includes a detailed discussion of how map overlays
can be used as a planning tool. A group of scholars in the Department of Geography at
the University of Washington in Seattle also made conceptual innovations at this time
