Chapter 3: Towards An International Geospatial Education Community

At the dawn of the 1990s, amid the flurry of early development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), one of its primary architects, Dr. Michael Goodchild (1992), paused and reflected on the situation to which GIS had evolved. Examining developments that had occurred during the previous 25 years, he claimed that GIS was no longer just a tool, but it represented a way of thinking about problems from a spatial perspective. He asserted that given the fact that GIS had its own research agenda, development initiatives, and an active community of users, GIS had evolved into Geographic Information Science. While it had strong ties to geography, computer science, cartography, geodesy, remote sensing, and other disciplines, Geographic Information Science was more than just a sum of the parts—it had become its own distinct discipline.