2010 — 2013 |
Ahearn, Sean Demers, Michael Skupin, Andre Plewe, Brandon |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Foundational Research For the Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge 2.0
This project will create and maintain a current Body of Knowledge (BoK) in the relatively new, rapidly evolving, and multi-disciplinary field of Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIS&T). A new environment is needed that will enable the maintenance and expansion of the knowledge base of GIS&T in a dynamic, interactive, and collaborative fashion. The new environment also needs to provide for new ways to facilitate teaching, research, and professional advancement in GIS&T. Developing a common language in such a new, rapidly evolving, and multi-disciplinary field is critical to its future viability. This project creates a transformational, dynamic environment for pedagogy, knowledge building, discourse, collaboration, and research in GIS&T by leveraging persistent immersive synthetic environments, ontological analysis, and knowledge visualization approaches. This project has four key components. The first component provides an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing Body of Knowledge that was published in 2008, and develops a more comprehensive and inclusive organizing framework for the next version of BoK. Second, this project examines a hybrid methodology for generating ontology through top-down development and bottom-up knowledge discovery processes. Third, a visually centered and highly interactive representation of the GIS&T knowledge domain will be developed. This interactive representation will serve as a foundation upon which existing knowledge will be modified and new knowledge will be built. Finally, this project explores dynamic wikis and persistent immersive synthetic environments for their efficacy with respect to knowledge building, pedagogy and research to create viable active collaborative virtual communities.
Expected result of this research will be the construction of a solid foundation upon which to build and expand the existing knowledge domain of GIS&T in a new transformative environment which fosters learning, collaborative knowledge building, and research through the creation of functioning virtual communities of students, teachers, practitioners, industry, and researchers. This project will produce a build-out plan for the GIS&T knowledge domain, will develop viable methods to visualize, navigate and build an ontology of the field of GIS&T, will contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the optimal virtual environments for the GIS&T knowledge domain. This project will create of a fundamental resource for both research and education within the field of GIS&T that will promote the advancement of the field and maintain the United States' lead in this critical component of our national economic and scientific base. The results of this project will provide a resource to link many of the GIS&T disciplines for grounding interdisciplinary activity.
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