The title of the article by Yang et al. (2010), “Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure: Past, present and future” should have given me a clue as to the extensive scope of the paper. By trying to cover almost every single aspect of GCIs, the authors provided an impressive review. Yet it was somewhat overwhelming as an introduction to the subject. I see the value in this paper as a reference text for more knowledgeable users. However, I would have liked to see more concrete, in-depth explanations of GCIs. I think my understanding of a GCI would also have been aided by an in-depth description of an unrelated CI and how exactly it was different from a GCI. Essentially, more tangible references would have helped my comprehension. The authors themselves link their work to GIScience by stating that this is a review of recent developments and that “similar to how GIS transformed the procedures for geospatial sciences, GCI provides significant improvements to how the sciences that need geospatial information will advance (265).”
While the article was very clear about the direction that GCI advancement should go in, the authors skimmed over barriers that might impede progress towards those end goals. The desire in particular for “a semantic (ontology) based framework that is sensitive to the scale, richness, character, and heterogeneity within and across disciplines (272)” is almost a chimera. I would argue that the ‘grand challenges’ briefly identified should be expanded into full papers themselves. How to integrate cyber infrastructures across disciplines and shift them to be human-centered paradigms are challenges that, once solved, could provide substantial improvements to the field. Geospatial cyberinfrastructure development seems to be at a crucial turning point. If all contributors could individually maintain as thoughtful a vision of the GCI framework for the future as Yang et al. while resolving current discrepancies then these far-reaching goals might become attainable.
-Vdev