This past week, I’ve been reading many articles in preparation for the symposium lecture I will be giving to the class. Yang et al.’s Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure: Past, present and future proved to be an informative read as my knowledge of geospatial cyberinfrastructures (GCIs) extended only so far as current end-user products, such as ArcGIS Online and Web browsers, and complemented my readings on complexity as well, as GCIs are very complex systems.
The article was much more than just a literature review of past and present GCIs however. It posed important questions regarding the ethical implications and epistemological and ontological challenges of developing GCIs for governmental, non-governmental, academic, and public use (272).
Following the in-class discussion that we had last week about ethical and epistemological challenges of integrating indigenous groups’ traditional ecological knowledge into GIS (as a system of knowledge transfer and as a science), I found myself asking many of the same questions while reading this article.
While I applaud the authors for pushing for an inclusive and open CI, I wonder how they will reconcile conflicts with regard to country boundaries, land use classification, the naming of cities and geographic features, for example? Who will have the final say as to what is fact? Perhaps we should create multiple datasets for the same region, so as to not promote reductionism? Who will ‘curate the data’, and will they be unbiased in their curation?
While many questions are left unanswered, I think that the article did a great job at presenting GCIs to academics and non-academics alike, which I found has been lacking in the articles that we’ve read thus far. It is important to remember that public and private funding is what will allow GCIs to be further developed and made widely accessible. Until proponents of GCIs fully grasp and account for the special interests of the GCI stakeholders and curate the code underlying the GCI functions (and not just the raw data itself), GCIs will have to be used with caution and with both eyes wide open.
-ClaireM