Progress in Spatial Data Handling

Abstract

In the past decade we have seen tremendous expansion and diversification of the loosely-knit 'community' of GIS users. Simpler user interfaces, more powerful desktop applications, declining relative costs, and the increasing availability of digital geospatial data have lowered barriers to GIS adoption and use for some new users. The growing involvement of community activists, local-level civic institutions, and non governmental organizations in governance roles has also contributed to this diversification of GIS users. Many of these groups, in urban and rural settings around the world, have begun to use GIS and geospatial data to inform their planning, problem solving and service delivery activities. Participatory GIS (PPGIS) research has devoted nearly a decade of work to understanding the needs, resources and constraints of these grassroots GIS users and examined how their GIS applications are shaped by the social, political, and economic contexts in which they occur.2 Researchers have developed conceptualizations of the social and political impacts of GIS use by grassroots institutions (Elwood 2002), examined the strategies they use to sustain GIS and spatial data access (Leitner et al. 2000), and specified the political, organizational, and technological factors that shape grassroots GIS use (Harris and Weiner 1998; Sieber 2000). © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.