An Interview With Michael Goodchild: GIScience and Social Reordering in the New Millennium

Professor Michael Goodchild is perhaps the best known GIScientist in the world. Indeed, he coined the term in a landmark 1991 paper in which he argued that geographic information systems (GIS) was a term that poorly described the spatial theory and commensurate analysis that had flourished with the development of computational cartography (Goodchild, 1992). Geographic information science, by contrast, implicitly recognized that researchers in GIS are fundamentally curious about conceptual models of space, unique characteristics of spatial data, and problems related to their analysis. Indeed, Goodchild suggested that the discipline needed to develop unique conceptual models of space, explore the sphericity of spatial data, and develop models to calculate error propagation (Goodchild, 1992). The purview of this research agenda was more closely related to geographic information science than systems. The past 17 years have seen exponential growth in these inquiries and the parallel establishment of GIScience as a critical forum in the information society. In the new millennium, however, we are faced with a rapidly evolving information society—one profoundly affected by geographic issues. Ten years ago, I interviewed Goodchild about a completely different set of issues (Schuurman, 1999). At the time, terse epistemological dissent was brewing between human geographers critical of the implications of GIS and those who were active in its development (Schuurman, 2000). The epistemological battles have mellowed considerably—if not disappeared. Importantly, however, the con