Has GIS been successful at making spatial analysis widely available to physical and social scientists?
Many commentators have noted the mismatch between the sophisticated capabilities of Spatial Analysis/GIS and the techniques that are actually employed in practice. This mismatch is especially apparent in the case of social science applications. Thus, while physical scientists have quite naturally sought out or developed new tools (DEM, spatial prediction via kriging, landform modeling and so on) my perception is that social scientists have not been similarly empowered by GIS. This contrast is not surprising, of course, given the geo-science basis for many of the techniques in spatial statistics. Nevertheless, advanced spatial modeling, visualization and generalization are typically not used as much as they could be in desktop demographic mapping applications. Too often business geographic presentations extend no further than address matching, point-in-polygon operations, and choropleth maps with basic demographic variables. However, technical capabilities are expanding to include netwo
