Part 1 Spatial analysts and GIS practitioners The current status of GIS and spatial analysis

Abstract. The history of GIS is traced, and a working definition is established. The early development of GIS was driven by spatial analysis, but more recent visions of the role of information technology generally, and GIS in particular, have tended to widen rather than narrow the gap between the two fields. GIS is seen as serving a much more populist vision, in which rigorous and mathe-matically sound analysis is challenged from a number of directions. Four basic tensions are identified, and the current status of e¤orts to resolve them is reviewed. Key words: GIS, spatial analysis 1 Development of GIS Geographic information systems have their roots in e¤orts begun in the 1960s to bring computation to the processing of mapped information. The earliest GIS, the Canada Geographic Information System (for extensive discussion of the history of GIS see Foresman 1998), was built to automate the processing of the information collected in map form by the Canada Land Inventory, an