GIS—Democracy or Delusion?

Abstract

Geographical information systems (GIS) are potentially powerful devices for integrating, manipulating, and communicating information, and are acknowledged to be vulnerable to the abuse of that power. A significant debate during the 1990s has challenged GIS users to respond to the suggestion that their technology is restrictive, elitist, and antisocial. In practice, the response from the GIS profession has been muted, and the paper therefore comments on the way in which professional GIS implementation might be interpreted from different perspectives. Comparisons are drawn between analytical GIS in post-Apartheid South Africa and operational GIS in the UK public utilities. GIS is shown to be an operational or decision support engine fuelled by information flows, and in creating the organisational pathways to support these flows it unlocks gateways the defence of which has traditionally underpinned the authority of management and government. A dilemma thus emerges. On the one hand, GIS has unprecedented power to disseminate access to usable information. On the other hand, it still supports a division which generates a technocratic elite. It is suggested that information democracy lies not in information flow as a technical process, but in information management. As a consequence, it is concluded that a code of data ethics may be at least partially effective in allowing a professional response to the critics of GIS.