“Qualitative GIS – isn’t that kind of an oxymoron?” This comment from a colleague with years of experience working with GIS echoes the title of an editorial from an edition of Environment and Planning dedicated to the topic (Kwan and Knigge: 2006), and voices lingering concerns about the limitations of GIS. Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach serves as an invitation to scholars in fields ...

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning of applications of GIS which grant legitimacy to indigenous geographical knowledge as well as to ‘offi cial’ spatial data. By incorporating various forms of community participation these newer framings of Geographical Information Systems as ‘Participatory GIS’ (PGIS) offer a response to the critiques of GIS which were prevalent in the 1990s. This paper r...

The fuzziness-based uncertainty of GIS products is studied from objective and subjective aspects respectively in this paper. From the point of view of objective aspect, the fuzziness-based uncertainty of GIS products consists of items concerning the data sources of GIS products. From the point of view of subjective aspect, the fuzziness-based uncertainty of GIS products includes human’s apprais...

Most current natural language based Geographical Information Systems (GIS) still interact with the user with the “question-answer” model. They do not support users effectively because the communication between the user and the system is easy to be broken down due to the ambiguity nature of the natural language. The collaborative interaction model was proposed for GIS so that GIS could simulate ...

The implementation and development of effective mentoring is crucial to the growth and success of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) librarianship and staffi ng. Mentoring is necessary to fi ll the gaps for all staff members, especially students. I propose that mentoring can assuage many of the staffi ng obstacles to successful GIS programs. Effective mentoring will create a healthy and produ...

The development of fuzzy sets in geographic information systems (GIS) arose out of the need to handle uncertainty and the ability of soft computing technology to support fuzzy information processing. An overview of the fundamentals of fuzzy sets is used to illustrate its use in GIS. The use of some terms within both the GIS and fuzzy information processing community is clarified. Since one of t...

Despite the progress in critical geographic information systems (GIS) research in recent years [1], geographical discourse is still dominated by dualist thinking that understands GIS largely as a tool for quantitative or empiricist spatial analysis. This dualist understanding of geographical methods—which was partly fuelled by the erce polemics between critical geographers and GIS users/researc...