I found the paper by O’Sullivan very intriguing. I was completely unaware of the fact that research in GIS is going on in some of the directions mentioned by the paper. I particularly found the sections ‘Gendering of GIS’ to be very interesting. In India, there is a lot of work going on in woman empowerment. And it will be very interesting to see whether someone can use similar systems given the limited penetration of the internet.
Privacy and ethics is another part of GIS which does require a lot of research. As more and more applications take into account the location of the user as a principal component, it is becoming very important to come up with standards for privacy protection. With the number of PPGIS applications increasing, a great number of people from the society are contributing to the task of collecting Geographic data. Though this means that GIS is getting higher acceptance in society, it remains a challenge as to how to release this data while striking a balance between accountability and privacy.
-Dipto Sarkar