Book Review

Contrasting with the recent influx of encyclopedic GIScience books, the Handbook of Geographic Information Science edited by John Wilson and Stewart Fotheringham (published in Oxford, UK, by Blackwell Publishing) is a timely and well-crafted overview of many key issues in GIScience. Divided into seven parts, the 34 chapters and 634 pages are written by researchers working in the field from around the globe exploring each issue in depth. Each section has three to seven articles on various topics. For example, the section Database Trends and Challenges consists of an article on object-orientated database management systems, adding elevation data, temporal databases, and geographic data integration. The editor’s introductory chapter in the first part of the book offers a terse overview and focuses on constraining GIScience activities to analysis and methodological issues. However, while terse, the introduction manages to delineate the editorial concept behind the book. Each part also has a roughly two-page long introductory essay that summarizes key points from the chapters. Each chapter is free-standing, with limited cross-referencing to other chapters and references printed with the chapter. Practically this organization works well, yet the selection of topics inexorably leads to some unevenness in the engagement with the broad spectrum of GIScience issues. The limited breadth of individual topics may be the book’s Achilles’ heel, yet the authors have prepared some very thoughtful review articles and discussions of issues that lie at the core of the GIScience methodology and spatial analysis. There are also some unique contributions that are important additions to GIScience literature. However, the editorial framing of GIScience in terms of methodological issues and spatial data analysis offers limited traction for taking up some recent questions and research with great relevance to the practice of GIScience. The first of these is the limited engagement with cognitive science. While cognitive science has had considerable impact on GIScience research of the past two to three decades, a reader would be hard-pressed to gain a sense of its importance for research. Second, and related to the first point, is that central issues of representation are passed over in the pragmatic focus on methodology and spatial analysis. Given the recurring problems of data integration and semantic interoperability and their centrality to both GIS and GIScience, missing this issue is a gap of significance for any handbook. The Handbook’s focus on methods and the development of spatial analysis that starts from the data veils considerable risks for those people who misjudge how the data refer to the reality they study. In a similar light, the Handbook editors have also missed an opportunity to make connections to previous writing on GIScience as well as recent work on the Body of Knowledge. Whereas David Mark, Michael Goodchild (who does offer an interesting perspective on future GIScience challenges in the Handbook), and others have earlier written at length, outside of the Goodchild chapter there is no engagement with the research questions nor with the research-orientated issues that a scientific field must engage with. Indeed, it seems odd for a Handbook of GIScience, considering remarks Goodchild points out in his contribution, that the Handbook limits its engagement with wide-reaching issues of ontology and interoperability, for example, to methodological and spatial analysis issues, especially when they are some of the most vibrant research areas with no ‘solutions’ in sight. Shouldn’t a handbook point out the challenges for methods and spatial analysis? In this sense, the part of the Handbook on future issues and predictions is intriguing as a check against what the Handbook covers and what is overlooked. Hopefully, a second edition can provide an editorial introduction that connects to the research questions of GIScience and contains chapters that cover the perennial research issues. Perhaps the Achilles’ heel in the selection of topics mentioned earlier should also be seen in light of recent GIScience encyclopedias that cover the proverbial ‘waterfront’, but in many ways