Geo-ICT: Connecting Physical and Virtual Geographies

Abstract

Physical geography, in its many flavours, subdisciplines and application domains, has been a cornerstone of geography and the spatial sciences in general for a long time. Due to its affinity with the ‘hard’ natural sciences, quantitative techniques were introduced early on, followed later by ICT applications. Researchers readily adopted these technologies to support statistical, mapping and remote sensing techniques. Geo-ICT then moved from a supporting towards a facilitating and key enabling technology. Research into global change, monitoring of land use changes over large areas, simulating complex multidimensional processes and developing scenarios on the interaction between the social and natural spheres simply would not be possible without Geo-ICT.

Today, most research in physical geography is conducted from a wider environmental science perspective. This means a move towards a system dynamics approach, allowing analyses to be made of interconnected processes which are well beyond the reach of research methodologies that do not rely heavily on Geo-ICT. Although not yet capable of fully supporting system dynamics approaches, this systems science approach is opening up novel pathways for answering old questions like ‘What is there?’ ‘Why is it there?’ and ‘What does the fact that it is there mean?’ A range of technological innovations in remote sensing, positioning services, geospatial data types in databases, system dynamics models, real-time sensors and semantic web services are driving future development. Physical geography typically benefits from some early adopters, but established paradigms are slow to change. Connecting physical geography to ‘virtual representations’ using a set of Geo-ICT tools certainly requires more fundamental change than merely ‘automating’ traditional workflows.