Re-engineering the GIS&T Body of Knowledge

A computational framework is presented for re-engineering the Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge (GIS&T BoK). At its core is an ontology that is meant to simplify and extend the original BoK hierarchical structure to better capture relationships existing among concepts. Our approach builds on several key ideas. First is the notion of a knowledge corpus, an aggregate of both the internal cognitive forms of knowledge held by domain actors and the content of external artifacts that are produced and consumed by domain activities. Second is the notion of a reference system within which such artifacts are located and relationships among artifacts can be expressed. Third is the idea that by structuring the GIS&T concepts through the use of semantic web standards for formal ontologies and envisaging it as a reference system for GIS&T artifacts, activities, and actors, a fundamentally different approach to the redesign, content generation, and maintenance of the GIS&T BoK is enabled. This new approach affords replacing the top-down strategies used to generate the original GIS&T BoK, with a bottom-up strategy that combines analytical and participatory components. On the analytical side, computational and visual techniques are used to provide alternative means for accessing BoK content, examining the semantic consistency of current BoK structures, transforming the existing hierarchy into a semantic network, identifying overlaps and gaps in the current BoK, and performing projection of knowledge artifacts onto the BoK to inform its maintenance and update. Participatory approaches to bottom-up restructuring and maintenance of the BoK will support authoring, editing, and validation of concepts using a wiki-like community editing service. The system we describe is deployed as a web service that can be accessed by a range of applications for visualization, analysis, exploration, and contextualization of concepts and their related classes in the new GIS&T Body of Knowledge. The goal is for the new GIS&T BoK2 to evolve into the centerpiece of a cyberinfrastructure ecosystem for the GIS&T domain.