Some Truth from GIS:
Information Technology Failures and Successes
Nicholas Chrisman
Professor
Geography Box 353550
University Of Washington
Seattle WA 98195 USA
chrisman@u.washington.edu
http://faculty.washington.edu/chrisman/
Outline of Presentation
Fundamental Issue: How can diverse sources be merged to
make new knowledge?
- Examples of when it didn't work
- Wastelands vs. Wetlands (Westport WI)
- Wetlands Inventory [Wicomico County MD]
- Low Level Radioactive Waste siting
- Examples that did work:
UW student projects
- Lessons to take from these examples
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
One (bland) definition:
A system of hardware, software, data, people, organizations
and institutional arrangements for collecting, storing, analyzing
and disseminating information about areas of the earth. (Dueker
and Kjerne, 1989, p. 7-8)
The organized activity by which people
- measure aspects of geographic phenomena and processes;
- represent these measurements, usually in the form of a computer
database, to emphasize spatial themes, entities, and relationships;
- operate upon these representations to produce more measurements
and to discover new relationships by integrating disparate sources;
and
- transform these representations to conform to other frameworks
of entities and relationships.
These activities reflect the larger context (institutions and
cultures) in which these people carry out their work. In turn,
the GIS may influence these structures." (Chrisman, 1997
Exploring GIS, p. 5)
GIS in use
integration of diverse sources
Most common path to integration
A database person might try schema integration
use linguistic descriptions to find formal equivalence
- Highly dependent on common terminology (ontology);
- Leaves out the geometric relationships
A more likely hybrid path: situated knowledge, making sense
of diverse sources
On to some examples...
Student Projects at UW
- La Selva Reserve, Costa Rica
analysis of selective cutting
- Bainbridge Island
prioritizing road projects based on environmental criteria
- Pioneer Square (National Park Serv.)
Historical data
- City of Bellvue
water supply, stream inventory
- EPA
Environmental Justice (Yakima)
Lessons to take from this:
- Some GIS projects can indeed merge sources to make some sense...
- Sharing data is hard without a clear understanding about
how it was made, and what it can be used for.
- Technology doesn't make use wizards...
Version of 26 October 2001