Spatial Thinking and Geographic Information Science

Abstract

Editorial Spatial thinking and geographic information scienceThis issue contains papers presented at the International Conference on STGIS 2011 (Spatial Thinking and Geographic Information Sciences 2011) held in Tokyo. Papers were selected through several screening steps, the fi nal step being the ordinary reviewing process of the journal.Spatial thinking is a skill of acquiring knowledge, structuring and solving problems, and expressing the solutions effectively using the properties of space. Spatial thinking is used in our everyday living, such as searching for routes, fi nding things, and locating objects. When a person in a commercial business establishes a new shop, he or she needs to consider the many potential spatial infl uences of the transportation network, neighboring land use, similar shops nearby, and so on, that are all integral to the effective management of the new shop. In everyday life, whenever one moves, one needs to compare possible route options taking into account the characteristics of these options, which are spatially infl uenced by the features along the routes. Whenever one draws a fi gure to explain some facts, one needs to search for a representation that can most effectively convey what one thinks. Moreover, we tend to use spatial analogy to refl ect on complicated things. For example, logical puzzles can be effectively solved with the help of fi gures. Spatial thinking is one of very basic and important skills for living.When it comes to geographic scales, spatial thinking becomes still more essential. Inevitably, geographers or researchers in related fi elds have to possess a good sense of spatial thinking. But the mission of professional geographers and planners is not only to strengthen their own skills of spatial thinking, but also to inculcate them in others. This can be achieved by defi ning the essence of spatial infl uence and encapsulating it in a simple principle. While observable phenomena can result from a multiplicity of factors, in many cases the outcome can be traced to a tractable set of core organizing principles. An archetypical example is the First Law of Geography set out by Tobler (1970), which states that "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." This simple statement confi rms that spatial infl uence usually decays with distance. Applied to people's movements, the implication is that people will tend to visit closer facilities in preference to more distant ones. This principle is encapsulated in the spatial interaction or gravity model which, if applied to business activities, anticipates that enterprises will be infl uenced by the characteristics of their neighborhoods. This externality or 'spillover effect' may distort aspatial statistical analyses because of the existence of spatial autocorrelation. Quantifying such effects has been core to the development of spatial econometrics.Another area of importance in developing spatial thinking skills lies in spatial representation or visualization. A summar...

Mutual misunderstanding and avoidance, misrepresentations and disciplinary politics: spatial science and quantitative analysis in (United Kingdom) geographical curricula

“…That integration, a long-term goal of GIScientists (Goodchild, 1992), is now being realised (Goodchild, 2010; Goodchild and Haining, 2004), and advances in the technology are expanding the range of work that can be undertaken – as illustrated by a recent set of papers on space–time integration within GIS (Dijst, 2013). Spatial data analyses will grow in relative proportion to analyses of spatial data as the importance of the particular features of such data becomes generally appreciated (as will spatial thinking more generally: Asami and Longley, 2012) and they will increasingly be undertaken within GIS packages (Smith et al, 2009).…”