The Genealogy of GIS Studies and the Concept of Topological Space

Abstract

1. GIS studies and the quantitative revolution in geographyThe early development of GIS studies originated at the University of Washington in which the quantitative revolution in geography took place in the late 1950's. Garrison's students including Bunge, W., Tobler, W. R. and Marble, D. F. had the original leadership in GIS study and have driven the top level initiatives for GIS development. The Garrison School was divided into two parties by different analytical concepts and approaches. One was a quantitative statistical geography whose conceptual keywords were spatial structure, spatial process and spatial interaction in Newtonian space, and the other was GIS studies based on topological space concepts.By the early 1970's, GIS studies were not dominant when compared with statistical analysis in geography because of the lack of technology in graphical facilities. But from the late 1970's GIS studies have been increasing by the development of some computer graphics technologies.2. GIS studies in the 1960's and 1970'sIn the late 1960's, the development of DIME files had a special influence in terms of topological data structure, geocoding and addressmatching. Fisher, H. made an important contribution to GIS study from the late 1960's to the middle 1970's and established the Harverd Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis in which ODES-SEY as Vector GIS was desigend. A significant symposium about topological data structure was held in 1977 at this laboratory. The results of the symposium were published as Harvard Papers on Geographic Information System edited by Dutton, G. in 1978.A vector GIS model was traced to CGIS (Canada Geographic Information System) which Tomlinson, H. R. designed in the early 1960's. This vector model means that the space was defined by the set of spatial objects such as points, lines, and polygons with topological linkage and connection.A Raster GIS model also was developed in the 1970's in the field of grobal environmental studies such as environmental monitoring systems and resource management using remote sensing technology and Landsat data in large national projects.3. Systematization of GIS studies in the 1980's and 1990's and the concept of topological spaceWe can recognize the spatial patterns and shapes of geographic entities on a map which represents what we see and know about the real world as one of models of the surface of the earth. The nature of a map as a model of the real world that depends on the concept of space demonstrates a variety of underlying conceptual frameworks. Geographical spatial models are based on the concepts of absolute space or Newtonian space. In particular, since quantitative geography was advocated, it has been important to measure distance between geographical entities and to make a distance based spatial model using Euclidean geometry.But with the progress in GIS studies, spatial data structure stored as a database in a computer has been drastically shifted from a Euclidean space concept to a topological space concept. The concepts of topological space and topologically spatial analysis were made clear in the context of GIS Spatial Data Models in the 1980's and 1990's.