Guest Editorial: Does Place Have a Place in Geographic Information Science?

Place is a central concept in human spatial cognition and communication, closely related to human experience (Tuan, 1977; Couclelis, 1992). It also serves as the prototypical spatial reference in human, economic and cultural geography (Cresswell, 2004), and hence, has undisputed standing also in noncomputational sciences. Yet, in spite of its prominence in everyday tasks and communication, place is still rarely mentioned in Geographic Information Science, mainly because of a lack of definitions that would allow a formal approach to capture and model places in spatial databases. More than a decade ago, Golledge and Stimson saw a need for measures to describe place: “We would suggest, however, that regardless of whether the tangible or intangible position was taken with respect to examining the sense of place, it should be possible to develop either a subjective or an objective scale (or some combination of the two) that captures the essence of a place” (1997, p. 417). More recent research concerns the modeling of spatial semantics, location modeling, and formal models of cognitive salience. All this can be interpreted as a seed for more broadly conceived place research in Geographic Information Science. This special issue aims to approach the topic of place in more formal and computational directions of research, including location-based services, human computer interface design, ontology, robotics and localization, social networks, modeling of uncertainty, gazetteers and georeferencing, tagging and text mining. The issue consists of research papers that originated in discussions held at the GIScience 2008 Workshop on “Modeling Place in Information Systems” in Utah, USA in September 2008. More than 30 researchers from geography, computer science, artificial intelligence, engineering, transportation, aeronau-