GI science, not GIScience

Abstract

The abbreviation “GIS” has been tricky since Michael F. Goodchild proposed in the early 1990s that the meaning of the “S” should change from “systems” to “science” [5, 6]. Until then, no one had suggested that “GIS” would stand for anything else than “geographic information systems” (although “studies” and “services” were also later suggested [6]). “Geographic information systems” was a term coined in the 1960s, and by the late 1980s had evolved into widely adopted software tools [6]. The reason for Goodchild to challenge the meaning of the abbreviation “GIS” was that, at the time, certain researchers began increasingly to view GIS as more than just a tool or system. A shift of focus from systems to science was a way to address the lack of theory and to raise the status of the researchers involved in the field. Initially, Goodchild argued for the use of the term “spatial information science” (in a keynote address at the 4th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling), but later used “geographic information science” (in a keynote address at the Second European GIS Conference in 1991). When Goodchild shortly thereafter was asked to combine the two keynotes together into a paper for the International Journal of Geographical Information Systems (IJGIS) he wrote that he settled for “geographic” rather than “spatial” as he was intrigued by the ambiguity it implied about the decoding of “GIS” and as it seemed to him that “there might be general truths to be discovered about geographic space that were not equally true of other spaces” [6]. Goodchild started the ball rolling with his 1992 paper. Five years later, in 1996, the International Geographical Union changed the name and structure of their commission on Geographical Information Systems to two working groups: Geographical Information Science and Geographical Modelling [4]. In 1997, IJGIS changed “Systems” to “Science,” and Cartography and Geographic Information Systems followed suit in 1999. The First International Conference on Geographic Information Science was held in 2000, and in 2014, it was held for the eighth time. Nowadays, the domain addressed by geographic information science is well-defined and persistent [6], although the debate regarding whether it is a science or not still resurfaces every now and then [10]. While the scope of geographic information science as a discipline thus is no longer ambiguous, the denotation of the abbreviation “GIS” still is, and this poses a problem. ∗The author would like to acknowledge Vilja Pitkänen at the Aalto University Language Center for her feedback on issues regarding the use of the English language and the author’s co-workers for their feedback on the text in general, especially Paula Ahonen-Rainio, Kirsi Virrantaus, and Andrei Octavian.