Previously I viewed GIS as more of a professional tool -- although I tries to turn it into commercial use by common people. GIS was used in the context of one person, one computer. The user take advantage of GIS to make spatial analysis. I believe that is largely why GIS has long been targeted to experts only.
In fact, another big facility of GIS is to serve as a communication tool, among a group of people, or even a whole community, in addressing a spatial issue. The difference between the two uses of GIS is data. In the first case, data has been collected from various sources (often in large amount), and ready to be cleaned and analyzed. In contrast, in the communication context, data is originally stored in user's mind. As he describes his spatial proposition or spatial experience, he either sketches a map or makes reference to a spatial feature. In other word, the map is dynamically created, and is dynamically changing.
The communication problem is actually a problem of information flow. In a situation of two-people dialogue, information flows from one participant's mind to a physical or digital information carrier (often a map in spatial issue), and from the information carrier to the other participant's mind. The process involves the translation from spatial mental model to system conceptual model, and again from conceptual model to mental model. There are two difficulties in the translation: 1) how to minimize the loss of information; 2) how to keep information on the receiver end as consistent as possible as that on the sender end.
The problem becomes even more complex when the social scale becomes larger, to a community, for example. People of various backgrounds are involved in discussion. As they make spatial reasoning and deliberation, they communicate their spatial proposals, assertions, comments, and arguments, which form a large reservoir of information. Furthermore, different pieces of information is highly related to each other. This relation might be linguistic structure, topic embedding, or spatial related. How to keep management of the complex structure of information is worth considering.
According to Walton and Krabbe's typology, human dialogues can be categorized into six: information-seeking, inquiry, persuasion, negotiation, deliberation, and eristic dialogues. Each type of dialogue bears different characteristics, and requires different GIS model.
GIS as a communication tool can be a very promising direction, which involves multiple disciplines like linguistics, social science, cognition science, HCI, etc.
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