To carry out the basic research needed to develop new geographic information technologies that are distributed, ubiquitous, and mobile, allowing geographic information to be accessed, analyzed, and used in decision-making anywhere, at any time.

Digital technology is moving rapidly to distributed computing. It is now possible for parts of a database to be stored and maintained at different locations, for users to take advantage of economical or specialized processing at remote sites, for decision-makers to collaborate across computer networks to make decisions, and for large archives to offer access to their data to anyone connected to the Internet. These and a host of other opportunities have arisen from recent developments in hardware, software, and large-bandwidth communications technologies (see, for example, Annitto and Patterson 1995; Burleson 1994; Onsrud and Rushton 1995), such as client–server architectures, universal Web browsers, and distributed databases. New wireless technologies now allow communication virtually anywhere on Earth, and can potentially support a host of new types of mobile computing activity in the field.

In the future, it is likely that large-scale, integrated packages such as geographic information systems (GISs) will be transformed into collections of smaller modules, and will be increasingly interoperable. The free flow of data between the modules will be enabled by industry-standard open object specifications and by the GIS industry's open geodata interoperability specification (known as "OGIS") (see the World Wide Web site at http://www.ogis.org; Gardels 1996). Modules may coexist in one system or may be distributed across a network and assembled only when needed and with minimal user intervention. We are seeing the rapid implementation of such technology in the form of "add-ons" to World Wide Web browsers and in languages like Java.

Several common threads underlie these developments, and define distributed computing. Computing is mobile if it can occur in moving locations: in vehicles, on aircraft, or carried on the body. Wireless communication is particularly important for mobile computing. Computing is ubiquitous if the user’s ability to compute is independent of location. Computing is distributed if the data, software, and hardware needed for a project are distributed across several locations but appear to the user as if they were united.

The problems and applications that GISs address seem particularly suited to take advantage of distributed computing. Geographic decisions supported by GISs must often be made by many stakeholder groups who are distributed both geographically and socially. In addition, stakeholders are often located in different tiers of an administrative hierarchy. Data custodians may also be distributed, as may be the power to process geographic data with sophisticated software and hardware. Geographic decisions are often best made in the field, in immediate contact with real problems, and geographic data sets are also best constructed in the field. Nevertheless, a host of issues arises with the implementation of distributed architectures, some technical and some institutional. Thus, the research community, through the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), proposes to conduct a series of systematic studies of the opportunities and impacts of distributed computing.

In this new environment, it is important that activities focused on geographic information be embedded firmly within broader trends affecting the computing world generally. In the future, geographic information could be fully integrated with other information types, and as familiar to computer users of the future as text and numerical information are today. Geographic information could be more prominent in the digital libraries of the future than in conventional libraries, and digital libraries could offer additional services for processing and analyzing data. But we need to take the necessary steps today to ensure that this will happen.

GISs have already adapted to several changes in computing architectures. Early mainframe systems were quickly extended to remote sites through the use of phone lines and terminals. The minicomputers of the late 1970s were replaced by workstations and personal computers that were increasingly networked for exchange of data. Client–server architectures were adopted in the late 1980s, in a first step towards distributed software. Today such architectures are being generalized to full distribution and peer-to-peer interaction, and the user may be presented with an integrated view of the system that bears little relationship to the system’s actual structure. Indeed, we may reach a time when the entire global network is best conceived as a single, integrated "computer."

Each of these changes in computing architectures has stimulated new growth in applications, in managerial and institutional arrangements, and in the basic economics of GISs and geographic data in general. These changes are likely to continue as technology moves to fully distributed computing architectures. Such architectures will likely provide the opportunity for the GIS community to interact with entire new communities, particularly the library community, and for geographic information to become even more important to a range of human activities.

We need to study the effects that implementing distributed computing architectures will have and the opportunities that they offer to GISs and geographic information in general. Such studies will require specialists in the technical aspects of the architectures, such as computer scientists, communications experts, and computer engineers. Effective research will also require the skills of geographers, economists, information scientists, digital librarians, and experts in public policy. UCGIS will play a key role in providing the institutional framework to link experts from these disciplines in a coordinated approach and to develop partnerships with software vendors and other institutions.

Society is being driven by an unprecedented rate of advance in digital technology. We need to anticipate the new applications and services that will become possible and to assess the costs and benefits associated with each of them so that we can continue to push for more economical public services and more competitive private ones. We need to take advantage of new technologies in education and research. Because institutions are generally slow to change, it is even more important for us to anticipate the effects that technological changes are likely to have on them so we can help positive changes occur more quickly and minimize negative impacts. Although the proposed research will focus on geographic information, it needs to be carried out in full collaboration with more general research activities.

The following are examples of the likely benefits from the proposed research:

• Cost reductions: Monolithic solutions, which fail to take advantage of distributed computing architectures, are likely to become increasingly more expensive. By examining the costs and benefits of alternative architectures, this research will provide the basis for detailed cost/benefit analyses and decisions that should lead to cost reductions.
• Benefits to users: Not enough is understood about the reasons behind adoption of distributed computing. We need to know more about its advantages to GIS users, in the areas of scalability, cooperative processing and decision-making, specialization of user roles, and new models of computing costs. We need to know more about the benefits to software vendors, and the business implications of open standards and interoperability. And we need to know more about the implications of distributed computing for educating the next generation of GIS professionals.
• Improved decision-making. Current technologies virtually require decisions that rely on computing support to be made at the desktop, where powerful hardware and connectivity are concentrated. Ubiquitous and mobile computing offers the prospect of computing anywhere, resulting in more timely and more accurate data and decisions.
• Distributed custodianship: The National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) calls for a system of partnerships to produce a future national framework for data as a patchwork quilt of information collected at different scales and produced and maintained by different governments and agencies. NSDI will require novel arrangements for framework management, area integration, and data distribution. This research will examine the basic feasibility and likely effects of such distributed custodianship in the context of distributed computing architectures, and will determine the institutional structures that must evolve to support such custodianship.

• Data integration: This research will contribute to the integration of geographic information and GISs into the mainstream of future libraries, which are likely to have full digital capacity. The digital libraries of the future will offer services for manipulating and processing data as well as for simple searches and retrieval.  
• Missed opportunities: By anticipating the impact that a rapidly advancing technology will have on GISs, this research will allow the GIS community to take better advantage of the opportunities that the technology offers.

• Examine the status and compatibility of standards across the full domain of distributed computing architectures and geographic information at national and international levels; identify important gaps and duplications; examine the adaptability of standards to rapid technological change; evaluate the degree to which geographic information standards and architectures are compliant with and embedded in such emerging frameworks as CORBA and COM/OLE; recommend appropriate actions.
• Build models of GIS activities as collections of special services in distributed object environments to support their integration into much broader modeling frameworks. This will help promote the longer term objective of making GIS services readily accessible within the general computing environments of the future.
• Develop an economic model of the distributed processing of geographic information; include various assumptions about the distribution of costs, and use the economic model to develop a model of distributed GIS computing.
• Modify commonly used teaching materials in GIS to incorporate new material about distributed computing architectures.
• Develop methods for the efficient use of bandwidth in transmitting large volumes of geographic data, including progressive transmission and compression; investigate the current status of such methods for raster data; research the use of parallel methods for vector data.

• Develop improved models (i.e., structure and format) of geographic metadata to facilitate sharing of GIS data, to increase search and browse capabilities, and to allow users to evaluate appropriateness of use or allow compilers to judge fitness of data for inclusion in GIS.
• Develop theory that addresses the optimal location of computing activity, building on existing theories of the location of economic and other activities and on the economic model described earlier.
• Study the nature of human–computer interaction in the field, and the effects of different interaction modalities, including speech, sketch, and gesture.
• Develop new adaptive methods of field sampling that are directed by real-time analysis in the field.
• Study the role of contextual information gathered in the field by new technologies and used to inform subsequent analysis of primary data.
• Examine the implications of distributed computing with respect to intellectual property rights to geographic information and within the context of broader developments in this area.
• Examine the social implications of distributed computing and its impacts on existing institutions and institutional arrangements.
• Conduct case studies examining the application of distributed computing in GISs, including horizontal applications (with data distributed across different locations), and vertical applications (with data distributed at different levels in the administrative hierarchy).

• Monitor the progress of research addressing the technical problems that distributed computing architectures pose with regard to geographic information, including maintenance of data integrity, fusion and integration of data , and automated generalization.