Geographic information science: emerging research on the societal implications of the geospatial web

Abstract

This review examines emerging research on the geoweb, particularly recent efforts to assess the social, political and disciplinary shifts associated with it. The rise of the geoweb is associated with shifts in the processes and power relations of spatial data creation and use, reconfigurations in previously bounded disciplinary knowledge sets, and shifts in the subjectivities and social relations that are produced through the geoweb’s technologies, data, and practices. This early research on the societal implications of the geoweb is drawing productively upon conceptual frameworks from critical GIS, public participation GIS, and spatial data infrastructure research, but must also theorize beyond these existing bodies of work.