From Representation to Geocomputation: Some Theoretical Accounts of Geographic Information Science

Abstract

This essay discusses theoretical perspectives in GIScience in representing and computing geographic information. Grounding the discussion is the need for new ways of thinking about new facts. Information and geospatial technologies continue acquiring new facts of various kinds. New ways of thinking about these new facts are essential to theoretical advances. Geographic representation encodes new facts to evoke new ways of thinking about them. Geocomputation carries out analytical and modeling procedures to realize these new ways of thinking. Discussions follow the proposed object-field continuum and event-process continuum to capture the essence of geographic representation and computational thinking. While much progress has been made, theories in GIScience research mostly apply existing ones from other disciplines or surround conceptual, logical, or ontological arguments. The lack of a well-defined theory for geographic information presents an excellent research opportunity. Theories for statistics and machine learning are exemplars.