Abstract
Space-time integration has long been the topic of study and speculation in geography. However, in recent years an entirely new form of space-time integration has become possible in GIS and GIScience: real-time space-time integration and interaction. While real-time spatiotemporal data is now being generated almost ubiquitously, and its applications in research and commerce are widespread and rapidly accelerating, the ability to continuously create and interact with fused space-time data in geography and GIScience is a recent phenomenon made possible by the invention and development of real-time interactive (RTI) GPS/GIS technology and functionality in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This innovation has since functioned as a core change agent in geography, cartography, GIScience and many related fields, profoundly realigning traditional relationships and structures, expanding research horizons, and transforming the ways geographic data is now collected, mapped, modeled, and used, both in geography and in science and society more broadly. Real-time space-time interactive functionality remains today the underlying process generating the current explosion of fused spatiotemporal data, new geographic research initiatives, and myriad geospatial applications in governments, businesses, and society. This essay addresses briefly the development of these real-time space-time functions and capabilities; their impact on geography, cartography, and GIScience; and some implications for how discovery and change can occur in geography and GIScience, and how we might foster continued innovation in these fields.
Have you also learned that secret from the river…that the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future?
(Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (1951))
This chapter has been reprinted with the permission of the Association of American Geographers and Taylor & Francis, LLC. Originally published: Douglas B. Richardson (2013) Real-Time Space–Time Integration in GIScience and Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103:5, 1062–1071.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In what follows, spatial and spatiotemporal should be taken as including references to location and also to time where appropriate. GPS refers also to new similar positioning systems providing equivalent autonomous and accurate location and time. GIS refers to a broad range of geographic database systems, including but not limited to commercial GIS products. GIScience refers to research on the scientific and technological challenges associated with working with spatial or spatiotemporal data, including philosophical, ethical and social considerations integral to its practice. “Real-time” refers, as always when dealing with the electronic transmission and processing of measurements, to “near real-time.”
- 2.
One could argue that RTI GPS/GIS has functioned within the disciplines of Geography, GIScience, Cartography, and related fields, as what is termed in computer science and related industries as a “Disruptive Technology,” impacting past processes and procedures broadly throughout these disciplines and industries (Bower and Christensen 1995).
- 3.
Archival documentation of early real-time space-time integration systems is available at www.aag.org/RTIGPSGIS.
- 4.
As David Lowenthal (1961) pointed out, the focus of geographic enquiry is fundamentally congruous with the objects and structures and immediacy of common experience. More than any other field, he argues, “the subject matter of geography approximates the world of general discourse; the palpable present, the everyday life of man on earth, is seldom far from our professional concerns…geography observes and analyzes aspects of the milieu on the scale and in the categories that they are usually apprehended in everyday life” (241). Along similar lines, when referring to the experience of RTI GPS/GIS mapping, Ron Abler (1993) noted that,
Few geographers will be able to resist the seduction of creating new maps interactively, in real time, amid the real phenomena the maps represent, while at the same time referring to and revising the background maps for the area contained in portable geographic information systems carried into the field. The capability for displaying to a person in the field background maps, the map being created, and the individuals changing position on both background and new maps will arouse the dormant field work virus lurking in even the most ardent armchair geographer. (135)
The immediacy and somewhat exhilarating experience of direct encounter and interaction with the real world in real time while using RTI GPS/GIS has been remarked on by many users of these technologies.
- 5.
A special 3-day Symposium focused on the research status, recent advances, and research needs of space-time integration, modeling and analysis in geography and GIScience was organized by the Association of American Geographers (AAG) for its Annual Meeting in Seattle, April 12–16, 2011. This major research Symposium built on momentum from an earlier space-time analysis workshop co-sponsored by the AAG, Esri, the University of Redlands, and the University of Southern California in February of 2010. Research agendas presented here draw in part on collaborative activities undertaken by the author during these symposia and workshops. The space-time integration research presented at the AAG Symposium has generated, as intended, many ongoing outcomes. These include books, workshops, journal special issues, NSF and NIH research proposals, and this space-time forum in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, which provides perspectives from each of the plenary speakers at the AAG Space-Time Symposium.
Space-time integration has of course long been the topic of study and speculation in geography and beyond. A great deal of productive research has been undertaken generally on space-time relationships in GIS and GIScience, with a few leading examples including Worboys (2005), Kwan (2004), Cressie and Wikle (2011), Miller (2004), Peuquet (2002) and Yuan (1996), and with broader treatments by Hawking (1988), Hägerstrand (1970), and Kennedy (2002).
- 6.
RTI GPS/GIS technologies have long been used from helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft for rapid response to disasters such as earthquakes, forest fires, and floods (Mauney and Bottorff 1993). Continuous environmental sensor input to mobile RTI GPS/GIS systems was well developed by the early 1990s. Early automated sensor inputs included laser range finders, Geiger counters, air quality monitors, bathemetric sensors, radio frequency signal strength instruments, etc. Subsequent extensions of early RTI GPS/GIS laser range finder integration include the addition of multiple lasers and other features for current LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems. UAVs and other vehicles now integrate RTI GPS/GIS functionality with multiple sensor systems, including most of those available in the early 1990s.
- 7.
Issues of privacy and dual use of RTI GPS/GIS technologies are also significant. I have addressed these questions in multiple venues (see for example, Richardson 2008), and as chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Human Rights Coalition Steering Committee (Albro and Richardson 2012). The dilemma posed by the prospect of any scientific or technological innovation being used or abused for the wrong ends is a real and inevitable cause for concern. Norbert Weiner famously stated that, “I have seriously considered the possibility of giving up my scientific productive effort because I know of no way to publish without letting my inventions go into the wrong hands” (Roszak 1994). These issues have been the focus of a substantial body of scholarship during the past half century (see, for example, Pickles (1995). Harris and Weiner (1998), Onsrud (2003), and Chomsky (1969)).
References
Abler, R. F. (1993). Everything in its place: GPS, GIS, and geography in the 1990s. The Professional Geographer, 45(2), 131–139.
Abler, F., & Richardson, D. (2003). Geographic management systems for homeland security. In S. L. Cutter, D. B. Richardson, & T. J. Wilbanks (Eds.), The geographical dimensions of terrorism (pp. 117–124). New York: Routledge.
Albro, R., & Richardson, D. (Co-chairs). (2012). Intersections of science, ethics and human rights: The question of human subjects protection. Washington, DC: Science Ethics and Human Rights Working Group of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition. http://srhrl.aaas.org/coalition/WG/2/Projects/HumanSubjects/Report.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb 2013.
Bower, J. L., & Christensen, C. M. (1995). Disruptive technologies: Catching the wave. Harvard Business Review, 73(1), 43–54.
Chomsky, N. (1969). American power and the new mandarins. New York: Routledge.
Cressie, N. A. C., & Wikle, C. K. (2011). Statistics for spatio-temporal data. New York: Wiley.
Galison, P. (2003). Einstein’s clocks, Poincaré’s maps. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Goodchild, M. F. (1992). Geographical information science. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 6(1), 31–45.
Goodchild, M. F. (2010). Twenty years of progress: GIScience in 2010. Journal of Spatial Information Science, 1, 3–20.
Hägerstrand, T. (1970). What about people in regional science? Papers of the Regional Science Association, 24, 7–21.
Harris, T., & Weiner, D. (1998). Empowerment, marginalization, and community-integrated GIS. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, 25(2), 67–76.
Hawking, S. W. (1988). A brief history of time: From the big bang to black holes. Toronto: Bantam Books.
Hesse, H. (1951). Siddhartha (pp. 106–107). New York: New Directions Publishing and Bantam Books.
Kennedy, M. (2002). The global positioning system and GIS (2nd ed.). New York: Taylor & Francis.
Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kwan, M.-P. (2004). GIS methods in time-geographic research: Geocomputation and geovisualization of human activity patterns. Geografiska Annaler B, 86(4), 267–280.
Kwan, M.-P. (2009). From place-based to people-based exposure measures. Social Science & Medicine, 69, 1311–1313.
Kwan, M.-P. (2012a). The uncertain geographic context problem. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(5), 958–968.
Kwan, M.-P. (2012b). How GIS can help address the uncertain geographic context problem in social science research. Annals of GIS, 18, 245–255.
Li, Z., Ding, B., Han, J., & Kays, R. (2010). Swarm: Mining relaxed temporal moving object clusters. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 3(1), 723–734.
Longino, H. E. (2002). The fate of knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lowenthal, D. (1961). Geography, experience, and imagination: Towards a geographical epistemology. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51, 241–260.
Mauney, T., & Bottorff, H. R. (1993, November/December). GIS and the Midwest flood. ACSM Bulletin, pp. 24–29.
Mauney, T., Kong, A., & Richardson, D. (1993). Interactive automated mapping system. U.S. Patent No. 5,214,757 filed 29 September 1992 and issued 25 May 1993 (Continuation of Ser. No. 564,018, August 7, 1990).
McQuoid, J., & Dijst, M. (2012). Bringing emotions to time geography: The case of mobilities of poverty. Journal of Transport Geography, 23, 26–34.
Miller, H. J. (2004). What about people in geographic information science? In P. Fisher & D. Unwin (Eds.), Re-presenting geographic information systems (pp. 215–242). Hoboken: Wiley.
Monaghan, P. (2013, April 5). The human art of way-finding. The Chronicle Review, p. B17.
Onsrud, H. (2003). Openness versus security of geographic information. In S. Cutter, D. Richardson, & T. Wilbanks (Eds.), The geographical dimensions of terrorism (pp. 207–212). New York: Routledge.
Peuquet, D. J. (2002). Representations of space and time. New York: Guilford.
Pickering, A. (1995). The mangle of practice. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Pickles, J. (1995). Ground truth: The social implications of geographic information systems. New York: Guilford.
Richardson, D. (1990). GeoResearch contracts for GEOLINK projects around the world. ArcNews, 12(2), 30.
Richardson, D. (1993). GeoLink moves mapping into a whole new field—yours. Washington, DC: GeoResearch, Inc.
Richardson, D. (2006). GIS&T: Transforming science and society. In D. DiBiase, M. DeMers, A. Johnson, K. Kemp, A. T. Luck, B. Plewe, E. Wentz, et al. (Eds.), Geographic information science & technology body of knowledge (pp. vii–x). Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers.
Richardson, D. (2008). Homeland security and context. In D. Z. Sui (Ed.), Geospatial technologies and homeland security: Research frontiers and future challenges (pp. vii–ix). New York: Springer.
Richardson, D. (2011). Geohistories. In M. Dear, J. Ketchum, S. Luria, & D. Richardson (Eds.), GeoHumanities: Art, history, text at the edge of place (pp. 209–214). New York: Routledge.
Richardson, D., McKendry, J., Goodchild, M., Kwan, M.-P., McLafferty, S., Tatalovich, Z., Stinchcomb, D., & Deeds, B. (2011). Establishing an NIH-wide geospatial infrastructure for medical research: Opportunities, challenges, and next steps. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. http://www.aag.org/AAG-NIH_Geospatial_Infrastructure. Accessed 30 Apr 2013.
Richardson, D., & Solis, P. (2004). Confronted by unsurmountable opportunities: Geography in society at the AAG’s centennial. The Professional Geographer, 56(1), 4–11.
Richardson, D. B., Volkow, N. D., Kwan, M.-P., Kaplan, R. M., Goodchild, M. F., & Croyle, R. T. (2013). Spatial turn in health research. Science, 339, 1390–1392.
Roszak, T. (1994). The cult of information. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wang, S. (2010). A cyberGIS framework for the synthesis of cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and spatial analysis. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100(3), 535–557.
Worboys, M. F. (2005). Event-oriented approaches to geographic phenomena. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 19(1), 1–28.
Yuan, M. (1996). Modeling semantical, temporal, and spatial information in geographic information systems. In M. Craglia & H. Couclelis (Eds.), Geographic information research: Bridging the Atlantic (pp. 334–347). London: Taylor & Francis.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Martin Dijst, the Editor of this special Forum on Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments. I would also like to acknowledge Jean McKendry for her insightful thoughts on an earlier draft of this essay, and Martin Fox for his comments and assistance in compiling the archival materials relevant to this research. This research was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute of the NIH (R13CA162823) and the NSF (BCS-1244691). The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or the NSF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Richardson, D. (2015). Real-Time Space-Time Integration in GIScience and Geography. In: Kwan, MP., Richardson, D., Wang, D., Zhou, C. (eds) Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9205-9_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9205-9_21
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-9204-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-9205-9
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)