Operationalizing places in GIScience: A review

Abstract

The space–place dichotomy has long been discussed in geography, psychology, philosophy, and more recently in geographic information science. The attempts to integrate vague notions of place into geographic information systems (GIS) constitute the foundations of the place‐based GIS stream of research, but the rationale and methods for operationalizing place differ considerably in the literature. We present a literature review in an attempt to identify and discuss the distinct yet overlapping frameworks that aim to bridge the gap between space, place, and GIS. The review shows that most studies designed knowledge‐based models in the urban context based on concepts drawn from human geography. Using mixed methods, we synthesize the findings, thus encouraging future research in building new conceptual and methodological models that are able to expand and solidify the scope of place‐based GIS.

Six GIScience Ideas That Must Die

“…In the past, GI scientists have viewed this as a challenge, which has led to a plethora of publications aimed at computationally modeling place in one way or another. Geographers and information scientists have been approaching the topic of place from a quantitative perspective for at least the past decade (Tang and Painho, 2021;Goodchild and Li, 2011;Scheider and Janowicz, 2014), and arguably longer (Harrison and Dourish, 1996;Winter et al, 2009). Paradoxically, at the same time, we have continued to hold onto the notion that place is unquantifiable (Golledge and Stimson, 1997), and that holistically modeling place computationally is an insurmountable task.…”

Bridging Geospatial and Semantic Worlds: Enhancing Analysis of Place-Based Concepts in GIS

“…Places are extensively investigated in other related subjects such as human geography [10,[12][13][14], urban science [15][16][17], and philosophy [18]; however, they offer computational challenges in GIScience due to their complex nature [19]. Recently, GIScience has become more connected to people due to the development of volunteered geospatial information (VGI), the popularity of social networks, and the ease of sharing location [20,21]. Merschdorf and Blaschke [22] divided GIScience research into eight categories: critical GIS, qualitative GIS, participatory GIS (PGIS), volunteered geospatial data, crowdsourcing, ontology, semantics, and place names and modelling.…”

Emotive facets of place meet urban analytics

“…In turn, the complexity and multi‐faceted nature of a place make it difficult to quantify and require a multidisciplinary research approach (Merschdorf & Blaschke, 2018). Although some areas of knowledge such as GIScience and human geography have grounded theories, anthologies, and models to articulate the complexities of place (e.g., Agnew, 2011; Purves et al, 2019; Scheider & Janowicz, 2014), the implications of how to mobilize the pragmatic side of place‐based knowledge still have a long road ahead (Tang & Painho, 2021). This issue can be partly explained by the poor guidelines, protocols and tools to embed 60 years of place theory in social research into data‐driven studies and GIScience.…”