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A body of knowledge (BoK) is an inventory of knowledge or concepts of a domain that serves as a reference vocabulary for various purposes, such as the development of curricula, the preparation of job descriptions, and the description of occupational profiles. To fulfill its purpose, a BoK needs to be up‐to‐date and ideally widely accepted by academia as well as the private and public sectors. This article presents the initiative taken in the Earth observation and geographic information (EO*GI) domain to provide a current, comprehensive education‐ and business‐oriented EO*GI BoK called EO4GEO BoK. In particular, an approach to strengthen the business‐oriented perspective in the EO4GEO BoK is presented. This approach is based on the analysis of professional tasks and the mapping of these tasks to concepts and skills contained in the BoK. A critical reflection of the proposed approach that is based on the experiences gained during a workshop complements this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key components related to decision models, such as data, knowledge relevant to a decision, and geospatial visualization tools, can be shared over cyberinfrastructure platforms and seamlessly integrated and used by various decision-makers (Wilson et al., 2021). The selected articles integrate advanced cyberinfrastructure, spatial analytics capabilities, spatial and non-spatial data management, domain knowledge, and spatial visualization to tackle challenging decision problems that are related to geospatially heterogeneous and interdependent changes across the globe. GIS provides a data management, analytics, and visualization platform to help end users understand interactions between spatial and cultural factors in spatial decision-making processes (Goodchild, 2006). [Extracted from the article]

The use of spatial-data semantics for modeling the earth system and the need of ontologies to develop conceptually sound models is discussed.

In many technical professions, women are underrepresented. While a gender imbalance also has been assumed to exist in the realm of professional GIS, no data existed to corroborate it. The original survey presented here was developed by the authors to add both quantitative and qualitative research about the numbers and current experience of women in GIS to address this knowledge gap. A total of 484 women responded to the survey, providing a healthy sample size and a reliable and informative data set. A key finding is that some 42 percent of women are, overall, not grossly underrepresented in the GIS workforce. This does not mean, however, that underrepresentation in more specific areas or that other gender equality issues are not present. The survey results suggest that women in GIS might be more underrepresented in certain sectors and in certain types of positions, and use a higher proportion of "soft" versus technical skills in their current positions. Based on the research findings, GIS seems like a good field for female participation, with its good work-life balance, strong sense of community, opportunities for networking and mentoring, and importance placed on continuing development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents work that is part of a larger and ongoing research agenda exploring the persistence of health and social problems in some parts of New York City. To this end, the authors have developed a GIS framework that translates a highly diverse set of variables into neighborhood indicators that can help local residents as well as decision makers to understand the relationship between "place" and individual behavior. Using the example of two new indices, Community Loss and Neighborhood Risks, the readers will learn how data can be transformed to emphasize the communal nature of phenomena that is typically understood only in relations to individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) are an important city planning resource in the USA. However, curating these statistics is resource-intensive, and their accuracy deteriorates when changes in population and urban structures lead to shifts in commuter patterns. Our study area is the San Francisco Bay area, and it has seen rapid population growth over the past years, which makes frequent updates to LODES or the availability of an appropriate substitute desirable. In this paper, we derive mobility flows from a set of over 40 million georeferenced tweets of the study area and compare them with LODES data. These tweets are publicly available and offer fine spatial and temporal resolution. Based on an exploratory analysis of the Twitter data, we pose research questions addressing different aspects of the integration of LODES and Twitter data. Furthermore, we develop methods for their comparative analysis on different spatial scales: at the county, census tract, census block, and individual street segment level. We thereby show that Twitter data can be used to approximate LODES on the county level and on the street segment level, but it also contains information about non-commuting-related regular travel. Leveraging Twitter's high temporal resolution, we also show how factors like rush hour times and weekends impact mobility. We discuss the merits and shortcomings of the different methods for use in urban planning and close with directions for future research avenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous authors have presented ontology building tools that have all been developed as part of academic projects and that are usually adaptations of more generic tools for geo-spatial applications. While we trust that these tools do their job for the special purpose they have been built, the GIScience user community is still a long way away from off-the-shelf ontology builders that can be used by GIS project managers. In this article, we present a comparative study of ontology building tools described in some twenty peer-reviewed GIScience journal articles. We analyze them from the perspective of two application domains, crime analysis and transportation/land use. For the latter, we developed a database schema, which is substantially different from the three main templates commonly used. The crime analysis application uses a rule base for an agent-based model that had no precursor. In both cases, the currently available set of tools cannot replace manual coding of ontologies for use with ESRI-based application software. Based on these experiences, we outline a requirements list of what the tools described in the first part of the article are missing to make them practical from an applications perspective. The result is an R&D agenda for this important aspect of GIScience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents views of the editor on geosimulation, a method integrating geocomputational and visualization tools. Representation of Oklahoma tornadoes using geographic information system; Ontological bases for all geographic information systems; Research agenda based on geosimulation tools; Advantage of using geosimulations in testing geographic theory.

In the integrated framework presented in this article, a geographical information system serves as a shell to integrate spatial, dynamic and stochastic perspectives of biological invasions in a coherent workflow. A decision tree model stratifies the landscape with respect to spatial susceptibility and builds the spatial biophysical structure for the simulation of species invasion. A dynamic diffusion model evaluates the temporal changes of species to provide the dynamic parameters for the simulation. A simulation model derived from percolation theory simulates species invasion by combining spatial and dynamic information, and explicitly representing spatio-temporal patterns of invasions within the GIS-percolation environment. The simulation illustrates the great influence of spatial structure and connectivity of landscape on the diffusion of the species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list of referees who helped the editors of "Transactions in GIS" to identify which manuscripts submitted in 2006 should be published is presented. They include Graeme Aggett of Riverside Technology Inc., Nicholas Chrisman of the University of Laval, and Agnieszka Leszczynski of Simon Fraser University.

People that the author would like to thank for their assistance in the creation of the book are mentioned, which includes Sean Ahearn of Hunter College at the City University of New York and Art Getis of the San Diego State University.

Mentions people that the author would like to thank for their assistance in the creation of his book.

Asserts the significance of the contributions of editorial board members and referees who help the editor identify and guide the best manuscripts to publication.

Emergency management (EM) requires an appropriate understanding of its situational context in real time. This involves constant communication between emergency operations and administration, so that informed, coordinated decisions can be made in a constantly changing environment using the most critical and updated information. Challenges in EM include adapting to rapidly changing technologies, adoption, and communication. The goal of this needs assessment is to examine how the effective collection and communication of information has been affected by the technology developed to support it, to identify critical disconnects between emergency management professionals and information technology and telecommunications (ITT) professionals, and to identify opportunities for improved application and user interface development. The methods for this qualitative analysis enumerate and categorize some of the communication challenges faced by the EM community as identified by interviews conducted with subject matter experts using the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats technique. This study finds that the absence of ITT professionals with experience in emergency response and, conversely, the absence of EM professionals working in EM application development create a "cycle of disparity," where the key findings of this study both arise from one central input and feed into to each of the other key findings in a continuous cycle, reinforcing what threats and weaknesses already exist.