Sieber and Sengupta: Geospatial Agents Everywhere

Sieber and Sengupta’s paper on geospatial agents situates artificially intelligent agents within the context to GIScience. This spatial context results in the geographically oriented applications of the concept referred to as ‘Artificial Life Geospatial Agents’ (ALGA’s) and ‘Software Geospatial Agents’ (SGA’s). Effectively, these agents are technologies that allow GIScientist to be more efficient in their work by automating elements of the GIS process. These agents are limited by the information available to them; essentially the information available to them is the data that has been made public/accessible. The environments in which the agents are situated could lead to discrepancies among users depending on the information available to the user. in other terms, considering privacy, a user with extensive private data may have more applications and success with the agents than a user using only publicly available data.

I believe that the article handles the subject well within the domain of artificial intelligence. However, as someone with layman information regarding AI, I feel that more context regarding AI at the foundation might have helped to explain how these agents function; understanding the limitations, and the possibilities in addition to the applications might have helped clear up some of the ambiguity I had around the topics.

The article has encouraged me to explore these limitations and see what applications these agents might have for someone for a GIS user such as myself. It would be important to see how much information is needed on behalf of the user to properly take advantage of the geospatial agents.

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