Embedded GeoComputation: Publishing Text, Data and Software in a Reproducible Form

Reproducibility is a major issue for data analysts. In order to subject published results to scrutiny by peers, it is important to be able to reproduce the steps carried out to obtain them. Furthermore, failure to do so can lead to major crises of confidence in the results and arguments published. However, currently such practices are rarely adopted - possibly not at all within the geographical and geographical information science literature. Here we consider the idea of Embedded GeoComputation in which the computational steps used to obtain results are embedded within the documents intended for publication. Examples are given as to how this can be achieved for geographical data analysis, and the challenges involved in making these approaches standard practice are considered.