Whatever happened to the bipartisan Geospatial Data Act (GDA) of 2017, you may be wondering? This important bill is designed to facilitate and support geospatial data development, sharing, and coordination across federal agencies and partnerships with state and local governments, towards a more robust National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). Unfortunately, the bill has yet to reach congressional floors for a vote. Back in mid-November 2017, parallel versions of a revised Geospatial Data Act of 2017 made their way to their respective committees in the Senate (S. 2128) and the House (H.R. 4395). You can find the committee assignments at the links to the bills above. Those identical bills had been modified to remove language in two places, Sections 11 and 12, that UCGIS and many other organizations and individuals had previously regarded as problematic to the pursuit of open GIS and mapping activities in academic and public sectors.

Since that time, actions have been largely behind the scenes and the bills remain on their respective congressional dockets. Further discussions and debate around data and mapping language have taken place but have yielded no changes to the text.

As a long-established information science discipline, the Geographic Information Science & Technology (GIS&T) community has key contributions to make to evolving data science curricula. This statement articulates the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science’s (UCGIS) position for the academic GIS&T community and provides recommendations and action items for the benefit of both internal and external audiences. On May 22-24, 2018, UCGIS held its annual Symposium under the theme of Frontiers of Geospatial Data Science, coordinated this year with the AutoCarto conference of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS). Drawing from discussions at that event, together with many months of internal exchanges, UCGIS offers these statements for the benefit of its member organizations as well as the broader geospatial community. The goals of this white paper and its recommendations are to 1) describe and clarify the value of incorporating geospatial knowledge, skills, and data for students, employees, and employers within the emerging field of data science; 2) highlight potential pathways and opportunities for academic geospatial scientists to establish connections with data science programs and personnel on their university campuses; and 3) initiate a national dialogue about the synergistic benefits of mutually enriching data science and geospatial science curricula.

Please find our white paper, A UCGIS Call to Action: Bringing the Geospatial Perspective to Data Science Degrees and Curricula, available here (pdf). 

Papers in Cartography & Geographic Information Science, available for free (open-access) but only through Thursday, May 31, 2018. Thank you, Taylor and Francis publishers.

• Marc P. Armstrong (2017) How large is Aroostook County? Exploring the historical mutability of US county area measurements, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2017.1370392

• Sarah E. Battersby, Daniel “daan” Strebe & Michael P. Finn (2017) Shapes on a plane: evaluating the impact of projection distortion on spatial binning, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 44:5, 410-421, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2016.1180263

• Barry J. Kronenfeld (2018) Manual construction of continuous cartograms through mesh transformation, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 45:1, 76-94, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2016.1270775

• Lawrence V. Stanislawski, Kornelijus Survila, Jeffrey Wendel, Yan Liu & Barbara P. Buttenfield (2018) An open source high-performance solution to extract surface water drainage networks from diverse terrain conditions, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 45:4, 319-328, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2017.1337524

• Waldo Tobler (2018) A new companion for Mercator, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 45:3, 284-285, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2017.1308837

• Thomas A. Wikle (2017) A rationale for accrediting GIScience programs, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 45:4, 354-361, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15230406.2017.1375431

•  Xinyue Ye, Qunying Huang & Wenwen Li (2016) Integrating big social data, computing and modeling for spatial social science, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 43:5, 377-378, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2016.1212302

In May 2018, the TRELIS project, Training and Retaining Leaders in STEM-Geospatial Sciences, will hold its first workshop in Madison, Wisconsin. TRELIS is professional development for women in higher education in the geospatial sciences, which includes geographic information science, cartography, remote sensing, and related mapping sciences. TRELIS builds leadership capacity and skills around the topics of career retention strategies, mentoring training, career transitions, technical professional development, and work-life balance. With the name we instill the concept of a human capital trellis or scaffold of support, and embrace the reality of nonlinear career trajectories that move sideways, take leaps, and do not follow a single upward ladder.

We are pleased to announce the following members of our inaugural cohort. These TRELIS Fellows will participate in a 3-day workshop that has been designed to target topics and concerns of mid-career individuals, and focus on leadership pathways. Immediately following the workshop, the TRELIS Fellows will continue their professional development exchanges during the UCGIS Symposium, co-located this year with the CaGIS AutoCarto in Madison. In the coming years TRELIS will focus on additional themes as we aim to meet the very strong interest for these professional development activities.

UCGIS invites its membership community to nominate individuals for our Research Award, our Education Award, and our Carolyn Merry Mentoring Award. In each case, the respective review committees will be singling out from among the nominees those individuals who have demonstrated excellence in these different areas. While nominations themselves can only be made by someone affiliated with a UCGIS member institution, the awardees themselves can be from anywhere within the worldwide geospatial community.

The deadline to submit nominations for all three competitions is Thursday February 1, 2018, and awardees will be recognized at our May 2018 Symposium in Madison, Wisconsin. We will be meeting jointly with CaGIS’s 2018 AutoCarto at that time.

Update: 2017 Geospatial Data Act

Many UCGIS members have been tracking the Geospatial Data Act of 2017 (GDA) introduced in both the House and Senate earlier this year (S.1253 and H.R.3522).  The initially introduced bill has sections that are unfavorable to the principles of our organization and members.Specifically, Section 11 proposes to define “geospatial data” as “surveying and mapping” and those providing geospatial data services could be limited to “licensed architectural and engineering firms.” Additionally, Section 12 of the original text also included language related to “a person licensed to provide such services under State law.” UCGIS wrote a letter to our member delegates in August 2017 about this bill.

We are pleased to share the news that the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) has submitted revised language for the GDA that has Sections 11 and 12 removed. It is anticipated that the Senate and House bills may be reintroduced as early as this week, mid-November. We encourage you to keep apprised of these developments and share your opinions with your own state’s congressional offices.

The Geospatial Data Act of 2017 has been making news in the geospatial community since its introduction in May of this year by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. You can find the full text available at https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1253.  As of early August, the bill had been introduced in the Senate, and referred to the Commerce, Science and Transportation committee.  Earlier this summer the organization NSGIC (https://www.nsgic.org/) posted on their site that they were supporting the bill and had assisted in drafting some of the language in the text.  The stated goal is focused on strengthening efforts at building the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) and to reduce duplicated efforts by various agencies in authoring geospatial data.  While these are certainly goals that are shared by many in the wider geospatial community (including UCGIS), several organizations, such as COGO and AAG, have noted that some of the language in the bill is unnecessarily vague and may be interpreted to exclude many institutions and individuals currently producing geospatial data for the government.

More specifically, the bill assigns “geospatial data” with the same definition as “survey and mapping” and then provides a very broad use of the definition as it relates to the Geospatial Data Act.  The definition language used in the bill is based on the Brooks Architect-Engineers Act (cite) that requires that work falling under the definitions above are awarded exclusively to A&E firms with professionally licensed staff.

Some examples included in the Geospatial Data Act include:

Professors Luc Anselin and Jerome Dobson have written two excellent, thought-provoking columns, which set a standard that is hard for me to reach here. Their columns post poignant remarks on “space skepticism” and “clerks of science” and seem to paint a more pessimistic view about GIScience, geography, and/or spatial science (hereafter called GIScience). I agree wholeheartedly with the issues raised in their columns and that our field deserves much better recognition. In this column, however, I would like to inject a more optimistic perspective. I think that GIScience has indeed progressed enormously over the last 30-some years, thanks to the movers and shakers in the field. But to continue the effort in moving GIScience into mainstream science, we need to address significant societal issues using the best organizing principles and methods in GIScience.

In searching for the value of GIScience and how our field of knowledge and techniques can be used to address critical societal problems, I found what I suggested in Year 2000 is still very much valid. What I suggested was to have “sustainability” as a key theme that GIScience should embrace in working on. I argued that GIScience principles and methods are necessary in order to address sustainability effectively. GIScience is not only an “enabling” discipline, its unique ability in integrating various theories and methods into studying complex societal problems such as sustainability will and should position GIScience as a leader in this theme. I find my current research on risk, vulnerability, resilience, and hence sustainability falling into this realm. I am enjoying my research and yet am anxiously hoping that my research would yield meaningful theoretical and practical outcomes that would ultimately benefit the people and society. So I am here reinventing the Sustainability wheel.

Update #2: 2017 Geospatial Data Act

On Wednesday November 15, 2017, revised versions of the Geospatial Data Act were introduced in Congress (S.2128 and H.R.4395). The problematic Sections 11 and 12 have been removed, in part due to the persuasive and succinct arguments that UCGIS and other geospatial organizations were able to make. A great way to celebrate GIS Day! You can read UCGIS's interpretation of the original bill here.

UCGIS strongly supports this revised version of the bills. As always, we encourage you to keep apprised of these developments and share your opinions with your own state’s congressional offices.

 Aging doesn’t suit my lifestyle, but here I am, “emeritus” at two institutions−the University of Kansas and the American Geographical Society−and “former” at UCGIS and elsewhere.  From such a lofty vantage, I should be able to offer several respectable observations, but which single thought is worthy of this opportunity that UCGIS has given me?  I believe it resides in a phrase, “clerks of science,” that captures the greatest unaddressed threat looming for geographic disciplines and fields.

Since 1993 I’ve said advances in geography could position our discipline to play a major role in important issues, such as global change or the restructuring of east European economies and societies. In contrast, advances in GIS alone are likely to cast us as clerks handling data for the geologists, biologists, ecologists, political scientists, economists, and other current leaders in these topics.  Only by joining the fray of science theory and occasionally “drawing blood” will we establish ourselves as a respected force in the upper echelons of science, science policy, and public policy influenced by science. Meanwhile, many conventional theories—developed in isolation by specialized disciplines with little thought for geographic relationships, spatial logic, or scientific integration—have stood unchallenged for decades. 

UCGIS invites nominations for its 2017 Awards for excellence in Education, Research, and Mentoring. The Education Award is given to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to GIScience education, recognizing a career of professional contributions of both national and international significance to GIScience education. The Research Award is given to an individual who has made a particularly outstanding research contribution to geographic information science. This may include an outstanding peer-reviewed research work, or series of works, though other modes of expression will be considered, including patents, software packages, and non-refereed publications. The Carolyn Merry Mentoring Award, named in honor of the exceptional mentoring capabilities of former UCGIS President Carolyn Merry, is given to an individual who has demonstrated such notable and effective mentoring abilities and practices. 

Nominations for all three Awards are due by Wednesday February 1, 2017.  Please see our Awards page for more details on how to nominate your peers. 

When asked to write this column, the topic I suggested was “space skepticism.” Space skepticism is the attitude/position that an explicit spatial perspective does not contribute in a meaningful way to the knowledge discovery process. In this view, (still) shared by many in academia, GIS and spatial technologies may be useful tools, but spatial thinking is not considered to be fundamental to the scientific process itself. Of course, this perspective is not shared by the UCGIS membership, but then among ourselves, we tend to preach to the choir. So, why do I set a negative tone in this first column in the series?

I hasten to add that I do not want to draw too dark a picture. Important progress has been made in terms of the adoption of a spatial perspective in mainstream science, policy and curriculum over the past two decades. This coincides with the establishment of UCGIS a little over 20 years ago. We have indeed come a long way. My dissertation advisor at Cornell University (the late Walter Isard) initially characterized my topic (spatial econometrics) as a “red herring” (he later came around). And one of my first submissions to an economics journal got the response from the (single) referee “what is this spatial autocorrelation?” Today, GIS(T) is increasingly common in the curriculum from high school to vocational and traditional higher education. Spatial questions are addressed in the mainstream science and social science journals, and both spatial statistics and spatial econometrics have become accepted subfields in the discipline.

The digital version of the Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge (BoK) is now online at gistbok.ucgis.org! This dynamic, digital platform supports more innovative and applied uses of this knowledge. We have put in place a stable information architecture  combined with robust strategies for content management and curation.The Editorial Team invites subject matter experts with interests in writing or reviewing Topics to contact them.

AAG has developed a proposal for a new Advanced Placement course in Geographic Information Science and Technology (AP GIS&T) for high school students. The AP GIS&T proposal was submitted last month to the College Board, where it is now being formally reviewed. For the most current information, please see the AAG's AP GIS&T Course webpage.