Geographic information science in supporting business decisions

Abstract

Most of the studies to date concern the use of GIS tools in business. Meanwhile, the emergence of GIScience as a separate field of knowledge significantly expands this problem. This article aims to highlight these consequences in the broad context of the geographical relevance of business decisions. The main aim is to indicate the theoretical, methodological and practical problems resulting from the slowly increasing use of GIScience as a tool for supporting business decisions. This is the effect of the rapid development of geodata acquisition technologies, the emergence of new technologies in remote sensing, including big geodata, and the improvement and dissemination of geographic information systems (GIS). These issues are rarely addressed in the literature focusing on the presentation of detailed solutions and the most typical examples. They were discussed in turn in the article: traditions in geographic research and reasoning, types of geographic relevance of business activity, geographic aspects of business decisions, geographically relevant business decisions and their specificity, types and sources of geodata. The most useful and standard GIS tools in the context of supporting business decisions are then discussed. Finally, general principles of supporting business decisions by GIScience and related problems were discussed.