For me, SDS, like many (most?) of the rebrandings¹, is about belonging

It also signals a desire to move on from

GIS

And to instead do geospatial stuff

“But hunt for a central term that describes what all these have in common, and what do we have? Geospatial is perhaps the strongest contender, but it’s an adjective: “What do you do?” “I do geospatial. . .er. . .stuff.”¹

What is/are data?

A proposition

knowledge ≫ information ≫ data

What does it mean to retreat from knowledge to information? Knowledge is about ideas, about putting ideas together into integrated systems of thought we call disciplines. Information is about facts, about separating out a particular feature of a situation and recording it as an autonomous observation. (Taylor 1990¹, page 212)

A provocation

Could a GeoAI be (or become) a GKS?

Spoiler: I don’t think so

Another proposition

geography ≠ geometry

The geo-atom

the fundamental element of geo­graph­ical information is the tuple \[ T=\langle x,y,z_1,z_2\ldots z_n\rangle \]

Here’s Alfred North Whitehead:

[a]s soon as you have settled […] what you mean by a definite place in space-time, you can adequately state the relation of a particular material body to space-time by saying that it is just there, in that place; and, so far as simple location is concerned, there is nothing more to be said on the subject (Whitehead [1925] 1967¹, page 50)

So… what is geographical?

😁 Your one stop shop →

… in geography

There aren’t many general
free-floating concepts

Our computational constructs must be grounded in domain-relevant ideas

Some ‘portable’ (e.g., neighbourhood, scale); others less so (e.g., home range)

In Computing Geographically¹ I wrote that,

giscience […] should really “never again be quite the comfortable retreat for the technically minded” (Goodchild, 2006², page 687), which it remains, in spite of the best efforts of critical GIS scholars. (page 254, emphasis added)

I would say this, but…

Enough already with the rebrandings!

Why data, not information?

Why spatial, not geographical?

What are the implications of any of this?

Thank you!