This book contains twenty-eight papers by participants in the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on "Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space," held in Las Navas del Maxques, Spain, July 8-20, 1990. The NATO ASI marked a stage in a two-year research project at the U. S. National Center for Geographic Infonnation and Analysis (NCOIA). In 1987, the U. S. National Science Foundation issued a solicitation for proposals to establish the NCGIA-and one element of that solicitation was a call for research on a "fundamental theory of spatial relations." We felt that such a fundamental...

A significant part of understanding how people use geographic information and technology concerns human cognition. This book provides the first comprehensive in-depth examination of the cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction for geographic information systems (GIS). Cognitive aspects are treated in relation to individual, group, behavioral, institutional, and cultural perspectives. Extensions of GIS in the form of spatial decision support systems and SDSS for groups are part of the geographic information technology considered.
Audience: Geographic information users,...

The Conference on Spatial Information Theory - COSIT - grew out of a series of workshops / NATO Advanced Study Institutes / NSF specialist meetings concerned with cognitive and applied aspects of representing large-scale space, particularly geographic space. In these meetings, the need for a well-founded theory of spatial information processing was identified. The COSIT conference series was established in 1993 as a biennial interdisciplinary European conference on the representation and processing of information about large-scale space, after a successful international conference on the...

20 years ago, from July 8 to 20, 1990, 60 researchers gathered for two weeks at Castillo-Palacio Magalia in Las Navas del Marques (Avila Province, Spain) to discuss cognitive and linguistic aspects of geographic space. This meeting was the start of successful research on cognitive issues in geographic information science, produced an edited book (D. M. Mark and A. U. Frank, Eds., 1991, Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space. NATO ASI Series D: Behavioural and Social Sciences 63. Kluwer, Dordrecht/Boston/London), and led to a biannual conference (COSIT), a refereed journal...