This project will create and maintain a current Body of Knowledge (BoK) in the relatively new, rapidly evolving, and multi-disciplinary field of Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIS&T). A new environment is needed that will enable the maintenance and expansion of the knowledge base of GIS&T in a dynamic, interactive, and collaborative fashion. The new environment also needs to provide for new ways to facilitate teaching, research, and professional advancement in GIS&T. Developing a common language in such a new, rapidly evolving, and multi-disciplinary field is critical to its future viability. This project creates a transformational, dynamic environment for pedagogy, knowledge building, discourse, collaboration, and research in GIS&T by leveraging persistent immersive synthetic environments, ontological analysis, and knowledge visualization approaches. This project has four key components. The first component provides an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing Body of Knowledge that was published in 2008, and develops a more comprehensive and inclusive organizing framework for the next version of BoK. Second, this project examines a hybrid methodology for generating ontology through top-down development and bottom-up knowledge discovery processes. Third, a visually centered and highly interactive representation of the GIS&T knowledge domain will be developed. This interactive representation will serve as a foundation upon which existing knowledge will be modified and new knowledge will be built. Finally, this project explores dynamic wikis and persistent immersive synthetic environments for their efficacy with respect to knowledge building, pedagogy and research to create viable active collaborative virtual communities.

Expected result of this research will be the construction of a solid foundation upon which to build and expand the existing knowledge domain of GIS&T in a new transformative environment which fosters learning, collaborative knowledge building, and research through the creation of functioning virtual communities of students, teachers, practitioners, industry, and researchers. This project will produce a build-out plan for the GIS&T knowledge domain, will develop viable methods to visualize, navigate and build an ontology of the field of GIS&T, will contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the optimal virtual environments for the GIS&T knowledge domain. This project will create of a fundamental resource for both research and education within the field of GIS&T that will promote the advancement of the field and maintain the United States' lead in this critical component of our national economic and scientific base. The results of this project will provide a resource to link many of the GIS&T disciplines for grounding interdisciplinary activity.

Project Report

http://gunlock.byu.edu/bokviswiki/ ) is also design to enhance debate among the community about which concepts should be included in the ontology and at what "level" they belong. Visualization is an important approach to enabling the exploration and understanding of the GIS & T Body of Knowledge. To that end the BoKVis was created. BokVis enables the visualization of the GIS&T BoK using a number of strategies. These include: a treemap, a tree graph and an indented list. The BokVis environment also enables a user to project a knowledge artifact (i.e. article, course, resume, job description, ... etc.) onto the GIS & T BoK and compare two knowledge artifacts. Immersive 3D virtual environment were tested to see how they could be used to better communicate the contents of the GIS&T BoK and much was learned about the strenghts and weaknesses of these environment. The website for the project is at: http://gistbok.org . Two papers that have been published discuss the overall project and the work done on the 3-D immersive environments, respectively. Ahearn, S. C., I. Ilknur, R. Datta, M. DeMers, B. Plewe, A. Skupin, 2013, "Re-engineering the GIS&T Body of Knowledge". International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Vol 27 Issue 11, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2013.8023 DeMers, M., A. Klimaszewski-Patterson, R. Richman, S. C. Ahearn, B. Plewe, A. Skupin, 2013. "Toward an Immersive 3D Virtual BoK Exploratorium: A Proof of Concept". Transactions in GIS, 2013, 17(3): 335–352.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS)
Type
Standard Grant (Standard)
Application #
0964563
Program Officer
Thomas J. Baerwald
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2010-10-01
Budget End
2013-06-30
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2009
Total Cost
$409,292
Indirect Cost
Name
CUNY Hunter College
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
New York
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
10065