Encyclopedia of GIS / Энциклопедия ГИС (геоинформационные системы)

Geographic Information Systems date from the 1960s, when computers were mostly seen as devices for massive computation. Very significant technical problems had to be solved in those early days: how did one convert the contents of a paper map to digital form (by building an optical scanner from scratch); how did one store the result on magnetic tape (in the form of a linear sequence of records representing the geometry of each boundary line as sequences of vertices); and how did one compute the areas of patches (using an elegant algorithm involving trapezia). Most of the early research was about algorithms, data structures, and indexing schemes, and, thus, had strong links to emerging research agendas in computer science.Over the years, however, the research agenda of GIS expanded away from computer science. Many of the technical problems of computation were solved, and attention shifted to issues of data quality and uncertainty; the cognitive principles of user interface design; the costs and benefits of GIS; and the social impacts of the technology. Academic computer scientists interested in GIS wondered if their research would be regarded by their colleagues as peripheral – a marginally interesting application – threatening their chances of getting tenure. Repeated efforts were made to have GIS recognized as an ACM Special Interest Group, without success, though the ACM GIS conferences continue to attract excellent research. <...>