Fitting The Pieces Together: A Geocomputational Problem-Solving Environment To Integrate Disparate Analysis An Visualization Tools

INTRODUCTION If you take a cursory look at today's Geographical Information Systems, you could be forgiven for concluding that we already know everything about the world: data structures are fixed, methods can only be used with certain data structures, new methods can be difficult to add, and utilizing the functionality in external systems can be a challenging or even impossible task. In short, our current systems to support GIScience and geocomputation are typically quite inflexible and `closed'; it is almost as if they assume that the needs of the researcher are known and are static. But the world remains an elusive, open system and researchers are therefore engaged in the process of knowledge discovery and construction, which involves the development of new paradigms, and associated tools and techniques, which must be integrated with the old. Whereas substantial progress has already been made in the sharing of data (as exemplified by the Open Geospatial Consortium's recent standar