How well do we really know the world? Uncertainty in GIScience

There are many reasons why geospatial data are not geography, but merely representations of it. Thus geospatial data will always leave their user uncertain about the true nature of the world. Over the past three decades uncertainty has become the focus of significant research in GIScience. This paper reviews the reasons for uncertainty, its various dimensions from measurement to modeling, visualization, and propagation. The later sections of the paper explore the implications of current trends, specifically data science, new data sources, and replicability, and the new questions these are posing for GIScience research in the coming years

Twenty years of progress: GIScience in 2010

It is 20 years since the term “geographic information science” was suggested to encompass the set of fundamental research issues that surround GIS. Two decades of GIScience have produced a range of accomplishments, in an expanding literature of research results as well as in the infrastructure of research. Several themes are suggested for future research, based both on gaps in what has been accomplished thus far, and on technology trends that will themselves raise research questions

Formalizing space and place

International audienceThe space/place dichotomy has long been recognized in geography, and more broadly in the social sciences. The geographic information technologies that have emerged in the past few decades are almost exclusively spatial, however. The concepts, principles, and tools of the spatial perspective are reviewed, along with their importance in facilitating multidisciplinary social science. Arguments for a comparable placial perspective are presented and discussed

The spinal antinociceptive effects of cholinergic drugs in rats: receptor subtype specificity in different nociceptive tests

BACKGROUND: Several studies have shown that muscarinic cholinergic agonists cause antinociception in humans and animals when given by both spinal and non-spinal parenteral routes. It is uncertain which subtype of muscarinic receptor is involved in spinally mediated antinociceptive effects caused by these drugs. The cholinergic receptor agonists McN-A-343 (M(1 )selective; 3.89 to 389 nmol) and carbachol (non-selective; 0.029 to 29 nmol) were used in a rat acute pain model to investigate the involvement of M(1 )and non-M(1 )subtypes in spinally mediated antinociception. The drugs were injected intrathecally and results from experiments in which drug actions were carefully confined to the spinal cord were used to construct agonist dose response curves. RESULTS: McN-A-343 frequently diffused rostrally to the brain, away from the lumbosacral site of injection. Thus, in spite of its receptor subtype selectivity, McN-A-343 is a poor probe to use in attempting to identify receptor subtypes involved in spinal cord antinociceptive systems. However, in some experiments McN-A-343 caused spinally mediated antinociception assessed by the electrical current threshold test. Antinociception assessed by the tail flick latency test with intrathecal McN-A-343 was observed and found to involve supraspinal mechanisms. Carbachol caused spinally mediated antinociception assessed by both electrical current threshold and tail flick latency. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that M(1 )receptors are involved in spinally mediated antinociception revealed by electrical current threshold; other cholinergic receptors (non-M(1)) are involved in thermal antinociception at the spinal cord. This contrasts with previous work on spinally mediated cholinergic antinociception. These differences are believed to be due to difficulties in restricting the action of these drugs to the spinal cord

Citizens as Voluntary Sensors: Spatial Data Infrastructure in the World of Web 2.0

Much progress has been made in the past two decades, and increasingly since the popularizing of the Internet and the advent of the Web, in exploiting new technologies in support of the dissemination of geographic information. Data warehouses, spatial data libraries, and geoportals have proliferated, and today’s users of geographic information have a wealth of potential sources that can be searched for suitable data sets. Standards have been established, issues of syntactic interoperability have been largely addressed, and rich descriptions are available in metadata to allow the suitability of a given data set to be assessed. Table digitizers used to be an essential asset for any spatial data center in the days when most sources of geographic information were in the form of paper maps, and skill in digitizing was a major part of any introduction to geographic information systems (GIS). Today, however, users rely heavily on digital sources, and virtually all digitizing is heads-up on-screen

Generating Geospatial Footprints For Geoparsed Text From Crowdsourced Platial Data

The research paper reports on the generation of geospatial footprints from geoparsed text associated with geocrowdsourced platial data collected and stored in the George Mason University Geocrowdsourcing Testbed (GMU-GcT). The GMU-GcT facilitates study of social dynamics, quality assessment, data contribution patterns, and position validation for geocrowdsourced geo data, with a primary purpose of mapping transient obstacles and navigation hazards in a dynamic urban environment. This paper reports on the automated generation of spatial footprints using open-source software, and discusses the role of automated spatial footprints in quality assessment for automated position validation. A detailed, local gazetteer is used to store placenames and placename variants including abbreviated, slang, former, and jargon-based instances. Obstacle reports containing location descriptions are geoparsed and processed with the help of the GMU-GcT gazetteer to generate geospatial footprints, which are used in a quality assessment process to validate the position of obstacle reports. Continuing research with the GMU-GcT has produced fifteen characteristic footprints types, which are generated and grouped into simple, complex, and ambiguous categories. The opensource tools used for generating these footprints are MapBox, MapBox.js, TURF.js, jQuery, and Bootstrap

Prospective for urban informatics

The specialization of different urban sectors, theories, and technologies and their confluence in city development have led to a greatly accelerated growth in urban informatics, the transdisciplinary field for understanding and developing the city through new information technologies. While this young and highly promising field has attracted multiple reviews of its advances and outlook for its future, it would be instructive to probe further into the research initiatives of this rapidly evolving field, to provide reference to the development of not only urban informatics, but moreover the future of cities as a whole. This article thus presents a collection of research initiatives for urban informatics, based on the reviews of the state of the art in this field. The initiatives cover three levels, namely the future of urban science; core enabling technologies including geospatial artificial intelligence, high-definition mapping, quantum computing, artificial intelligence and the internet of things (AIoT), digital twins, explainable artificial intelligence, distributed machine learning, privacy-preserving deep learning, and applications in urban design and planning, transport, location-based services, and the metaverse, together with a discussion of algorithmic and data-driven approaches. The article concludes with hopes for the future development of urban informatics and focusses on the balance between our ever-increasing reliance on technology and important societal concerns

Seeking equity and justice in urban freight: where to look?

Urban freight systems embed and reflect spatial inequities in cities and imbalanced power structures within transport decision-making. These concerns are principal domains of “transportation justice” (TJ) and “mobility justice” (MJ) scholarship that have emerged in the past decade. However, little research exists situating urban freight within these prevailing frameworks, which leaves urban freight research on socio-environmental equity and justice ill-defined, especially compared to passenger or personal mobility discussions. Through the lens that derives from TJ and MJ’s critical dialogue, this study synthesises urban freight literature’s engagement with equity and justice. Namely, the review evaluates: How do researchers identify equitable distributions of urban freight’s costs and benefits? At what scale do researchers evaluate urban freight inequities? And who does research consider entitled to urban freight equity and how are they involved in urban freight governance? The findings help inform researchers who seek to reimagine urban freight management strategies within broader equity and justice discourse