Some time ago I attended a consultation on a proposal on the Indian National GIS. One of the participants pointed out that the term GIS was too restrictive and it would be better to talk in terms of geospatial. The suggestion was rejected out of hand with the flippant remark that the term geospatial was an adjective and not a noun. Touché! The correct term would be geospatial ‘something’ - like technology/applications/policy/education. The suggestion was sound because GIS is increasingly finding its existence dependent upon another technology. Look at Google Maps; we don’t call it Google GIS or even Google Remote Sensing even though satellite imagery is an important part of the system. Google Maps conveys a much better meaning of what the application is all about. We have geospatial applications and services which serve geo-intelligence which is much more than just a GIS. The story of immersive reality or geo-immersion is yet another example of this kind of integrated applications which has a GIS at the core but is definitely not only a GIS. Getting stuck in terminology may appear to be trivial but it may also result in getting stuck on an old way of working and not realising the full benefits of technology which is not as trivial as our third story shows.
Prof Arup Dasgupta
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