Lang feels that a major concern in the promotion of GIS on an integrated national level is the development of a system of standards to help all the agencies involved move toward the common goal. A Unifying Concept in Regional Analysis. The authors of this paper discuss landscape as a sort of physical and cognitive matrix caused by the interaction of human culture and physical environment. It has become an important area for study in recent years. It is not an easy concept to fully grasp, so Crumley and Marquardt present some key ideas in order to help the reader along.
Boundaries also change.
The authors see landscape as the product of two structures. They see the hierarchical organization of data as conducive to imposing falsely hierarchical order on analysis results. When the article was written in 1990, the authors had been building a GIS for seven years for a study in Burgundy, France. They found it to be well suited to analyze the fluid dynamics of historical landscapes. The abilities to shift spatial and temporal scales and boundaries, along with the ability to treat data heterarchically combine to make GIS highly adaptable to the study of landscape.