Geographic information science

Geographic information science or Geographical information science (GIScience) is the scientific discipline that studies data structures and computational techniques to capture, represent, process, and analyze geographic information. It can be contrasted with geographic information systems, which are software tools. British geographer Michael Goodchild has defined this area in the 1990s, and summarized its core interests, including spatial analysis, visualization, and the representation of uncertainty. GIScience is conceptually related to geography, information science, computer science, geomatics and geoinformatics, but it claims the status of an independent scientific discipline.