Gis and Spatial Data Analysis: Converging Perspectives

We take as our starting point the state of geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial data analysis 50 years ago when regional science emerged as a new field of enquiry. In the late 1950s and 1960s advances in computing technology were making possible forms of automated cartography that in due course would lead to the development of GIS. Although few would have imagined at that time that the complex graphic content of maps was amenable to processing by number-crunching computers, and that any purpose could be served by doing so, the development of scanners and plotters in the 1960s, along with rapid advances in software, began to open exciting possibilities, even at that very early stage in the development of computing (for histories of early GIS see Foresman, 1998; Maguire, Goodchild, and Rhind, 1991).