Science—and research more broadly—face many challenges as its practitioners struggle to accommodate new challenges around reproducibility and openness. The current practice of science limits access to knowledge, information and infrastructure, which in turn leads to inefficiencies, frustrations and a lack of rigor. Many useful research outcomes are never used because they are too difficult to find, or to access, or to understand.
New computational methods and infrastructure provide opportunities to reconceptualize how science is conducted, how it is shared, how it is evaluated and how it is reused. And new data sources changed what can be known, and how well, and how frequently. This article describes some of the major themes of eScience/eResearch aimed at improving the process of doing science.
Researchers and practitioners across many disciplines have recently adopted computational notebooks to develop, document, and share their scientific workflows—and the GIS community is no exception. This chapter introduces computational notebooks in the geographical context. It begins by explaining the computational paradigm and philosophy that underlie notebooks. Next it unpacks their architecture to illustrate a notebook user’s typical workflow. Then it discusses the main benefits notebooks offer GIS researchers and practitioners, including better integration with modern software, more natural access to new forms of data, and better alignment with the principles and benefits of open science. In this context, it identifies notebooks as the “glue” that binds together a broader ecosystem of open source packages and transferable platforms for computational geography. The chapter concludes with a brief illustration of using notebooks for a set of basic GIS operations. Compared to traditional desktop GIS, notebooks can make spatial analysis more nimble, extensible, and reproducible and have thus evolved into an important component of the geospatial science toolkit.
Researchers and practitioners apply the concepts and tools of GIScience to answer questions about geographic phenomena and to inform policy and management decisions across a wide range of social and environmental domains. Verification and validation of applied GIS research is essential to the development and application of credible geographic knowledge. Attempting to verify and validate the claims researchers and practitioners make when they analyze phenomena using the concepts and tools of GIScience is essential to the development of geographic knowledge. Verification is the act of testing whether the concepts and methods used to make a research claim were implemented in a way that is appropriate for the question being investigated. Validation is the act of assessing whether the concepts, measurements, or conclusions of a study are logically sound and factually well-founded. Researchers can pursue the verification and validation of past studies by attempting to reproduce or replicate these earlier findings. During a reproduction, an independent researcher attempts to recreate the results of an initial study using the data and procedures of that study. During a replication, an independent researcher empirically tests the validity of the claims made in a study by selectively altering different aspects of the initial work when repeating the study. This entry outlines these processes and how they are used to verify and validate applied GIS research.