What are the main research areas under development for GISc today?

Question

Along the lines of the closed topic about a master thesis, I would like to propose you guys with a question that it is simple:

What are the main areas under active research and development for GISc? Or, what areas need further R&D?

What are the current "hot-topics" for GISc? Modelling, simulation, temporal representation?

Answer 1

I consider these open and ongoing topics in GIScience:

• implications of user generated content (aka Volunteered Geographic Information Systems)
• geographic effects on social networks
• geographic network analysis
• geographically-enabled agent based modeling
• spatio-temporal structures and analysis
• rapid, interactive experimentation (aka geodesign)
• spatial information infrastructure
• object-based data models for continuous data
• real time and iterative geographic analysis
• analyses on the spheroid
• dataset conflation
• interaction between semantic and geographic search
• mobile mapping and location based services
• human perception of evolving geographic patterns
• implications and algorithms of mixed and augmented reality

Answer 2

• mobile augmented reality
• geographic data mining
• volunteered geographic information environmental monitoring
• realtime sensor networks

Answer 3

Automatic, yet appropriate, generalisation.

Being able to take high order geometry with a lot of detail and simplifying it for a coarser detail map, without dropping important features, is darned difficult. For example a chain of small lakes visible at 1:50,000 should not be shown at all at 1:500,000, yet the watercourse that connects them should remain visible, and continuous.

Answer 4

Implicit or suggested topology.

wouldn't it be wonderful if the computer noticed that the geometries of layers X,Y & Z were very similar to each other, nearly always following the same trends, and offered to conflate/merge them, or keep the others in lockstep when one is changed?

Answer 5

Automatic geocoding.

So far as I know, MetaCarta is the only company talking about or providing a service which attempts to automatically georeference any document based on it's content. For example it knows Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer lives along the Mississippi River. This is a rich field and there is a lot of room for more players and implementations.

Answer 6

Use of robotics for spatial data collection doesn't seem to be hot - but I think it should be.

Answer 7

Human perception and cognition is limited and those limits are becoming increasingly problematic as the volume and variety of information continues to explode in amount and complexity. How can the tools of space and location and representation be leveraged to transform this cacophony of data into pieces understandable, and actionable, to the human mind?

Answer 8

Parallel GIS processing was hot 12 years ago, but seems to have slowly faded. (The link to the "GIS Parallel Architectures Lab" on this page is broken, I wonder if the lab still exists). With so much interest in multicore and cloud, it seems like there should be growing interest in parallel geoprocessing too.

A lot of people say the best way to go parallel is via Functional Programming. That might be a good area, but it seems to suffer the same academic stigma that Artificial Intelligence was never able to shed.