Prof. Shaw gave the remarks during an academic report on the challenges and the prospects of developing a comprehensive “Space, Time, and Person-based GIScience”, which was given at Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGSNRR) on Oct. 20.

GIScience has been considered as a spatial science with a focus on features and locations in physical space. Shaw noted that although GIScience now is widely accepted as a useful field for many applications, there remains fundamental shortcomings of GIScience that need to be addressed. He suggested that GIScience should develop a theoretical framework of representing, analyzing, and visualizing activities and interactions in virtual space.

Shaw’s report aroused heated discussion on such topics as how should we represent locations of virtual activities, what coordinate system should we use to represent a virtual space, and how do current GIS support representation and analysis of individual persons as well as their interactions with the environment and other people?

Prof. Shawis Arts and Sciences Excellence Professor and Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Tennessee. In 2008, he was elected to a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science and received the Edward L. Ullman Award for Outstanding Contributions to Transportation Geography from the Association of American Geographers.