Does GIS increase position of geographical disciplines? Importance of GIS and GIScience for geography

Abstract

Geographers perceive information and communication technologies (ICT), including GIS software, as an element of inevitable transformations in geography. Some consider them to be ancillary to geography, some also note a digital turn that renews interest and links with areas such as computational social sciences and data-driven geography to gain a deeper insight into quantitative research, especially multi-resolution and multi-scale, on a time scale. Recently, the diversity of digital devices, platforms, applications and services is an inherent, normal and expected element of everyday life, and digital technologies are also a media standard for generating and analyzing knowledge in qualitative research. Progress, commercialization and popularization of geospatial technologies contribute to the development of spatial ontology and spatial epistemology. Semantic analysis of articles published in the most important geographical scientific journals (2014–2018) proves that interdisciplinary, methodological or applied geography approaches are most active in geographical scientific discourse.