Mobile Geographic Information Systems
Project Battuta

Prof. Keith Clarke
Department of Geography
University of California, Santa Barbara

Date: Friday, October 3, 2003
Place: ECE Conference Room, Bldg. 406
Time: 3:30 pm

Abstract:
Recent technological developments have allowed software for geographic information systems (GIS) to run on highly mobile and portable computing devices including laptops, palm computers, Personal Digital Assistants, and wearable computers. Integrating these mobile GIS devices with receivers for the global positioning system has permitted extraordinary accuracy and precision in locating users of these systems in the field. This presentation examines two of the consequences to geography of this phenomenon. First, mobile GIS has removed the separation of GIS functions (data capture, storage, management, retrieval, analysis and display) in geographic space, allowing real-time and place use of analytical methods at the point of data capture, and consequently changing the entire nature of data collection. We have termed this location-aware or progressive sampling, recognizing that, in a mobile GIS environment, not all field samples are independent, nor are they of equal value. Secondly, we show that GIS user interfaces for field applications are inadequate when based on traditional user interface metaphors such as the desktop and WIMP (windows-icons-menus-pointers). Software and a testbed hardware environment are described in which experiments are taking place, with the goal to more fully exploit the potential of mobile GIS. Also explored are some implications for the future of GIS that will result from field mobility.

Dr. KEITH C. CLARKE has been research cartographer and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1996. He holds the B.A. degree with honors from Middlesex Polytechnic, London, England, and the M.A. and Ph. D. from the University of Michigan, specializing in Analytical Cartography. Dr. Clarke's most recent research has been on environmental simulation modeling, on modeling urban growth using cellular automata, on terrain mapping and analysis, and on the history of the CORONA remote sensing program. He is the author of the textbooks, Analytical and Computer Cartography (Prentice Hall, 1995), Getting Started with GIS (1997) and about eighty book chapters, journal articles, and papers in the fields of cartography, remote sensing, and geographic information systems. In 1990 and 1991 Dr. Clarke was a NASA /American Society for Engineering Education Fellow at Stanford University, and in 1992 served as Science Advisor to the Office of Research, National Mapping Division of the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia. Since 1997, he has been the Santa Barbara Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis.