CyberGIS for Fostering Geospatial Discovery and Innovation

Shaowen Wang
Seminar

Geographic information systems (GIS) have undergone rapid growth since their initial development during the mid-1960s. It is clear that this growing trend will persist into the foreseeable future driven by numerous diverse applications and enabled by steady progress of related technologies. As a spatial data deluge permeates broad scientific and societal realms, to sustain the trend, however, requires innovative GIS capabilities to be developed based on synergistic integration of computational and geospatial approaches enabled by cyber infrastructure – an emerging infrastructure of communication, computing, and information technologies. CyberGIS – defined as cyber infrastructure-based GIS – has been developed as a fundamentally new GIS modality comprising a seamless blending of cyber infrastructure, GIS, and spatial analysis and modeling capabilities and, thus, has begun to empower scientific breakthroughs and show broad societal impacts while contributing to the advancement of cyber infrastructure. This presentation discusses opportunities and challenges, roadmaps for research and development, and major progress, trends, and impacts of CyberGIS.