This article nicely lays out 3 distinct arguments where scholars have argued GIS to be a tool, toolmaker and science. GIS as a tool and toolmaker is easier to grasp, while GIScience was much harder for me to wrap my mind around. At the beginning of this paper, my crude understanding of GIS as a science is if some form of rigorous scientific method can be applied to it (form a hypothesis, test a hypothesis, evaluate the results to improve our knowledge about the subject matter) then it may be considered a science. Here, the definition of science also becomes important where some have a vested interest to label GIS as a science to legitimize their work in an academic setting whereas others believe that labeling GIS as a tool doesn’t give it the credit it deserves when it can enact change and increase understanding. By the end of the paper, geographic information science is describe to be “concerned with geographic concepts, primitive elements used to describe, analyze, model, reason about, and make decisions on phenomena distributed on the surface of the earth” (Wright et al., 1997, 357). Does this mean that the “science” involved refers to the decisions we make in how we define categories, what we chose model (thus what we chose to omit), and theorize the particular subject matter?
My experience in GIS falls into the toolbox category – to visualize a certain phenomenon in space. In my opinion, depending on how far you go in your studies, or how you apply the software defines you view of GIS as a tool, science or somewhere in-between. For a technician mapping out underground pipelines, GIS is a tool, whereas a scholar studying the use of GIS by various social groups can be viewed as a science. No matter how GIS is viewed, few people will doubt the contribution it has made in our understanding of spatial phenomenon.
-tranv