Data from the Deep: Implications for the GIS Community

The traditional home of GIS in terms of managing,mapping, modelling and making decisions based on spatial data has been in the land-based sciences and professions. This has resulted in a concentration of GIS on land-based 'application domains' (sets of GIS applications with common properties and data formats), with a relatively homogeneous group of users and applications addressing the solutions of largely related problems. This atmosphere has tended to obscure the essential nature of GIS as an ubiquitous, heterogeneous tool, having utility far beyond land-based problems. We must consider remedying this if we expect GIS to play an increasingly important role in Earth system science or global change research. We therefore propose the expansion of a largely landbased GIS research agenda to the development of systems focusing more on the marine environment, for there are many ways that GIS may be improved by tackling the problems associated with oceanographic data. The discussion is confined largely to deep ...