Brief History of Spatial Information Policies in the United States‪.‬

Introduction American national government policies that support much of the fundamental research questions and practical applications of geographic information science (GIScience) and geographic information systems (GIS) remain a confusing amalgam of deliberative, incremental, and in some cases, accidental public choices. Directing these choices are a half century of public and private initiatives to encourage government efficiency, along with substantial economic development for both civil and military science/technology research programs. By the late 1990s, because of the rapid diffusion of powerful information technologies throughout American society, GIScience and GIS would become essential elements in American public policy structure. Indeed, since the Second World War, U.S. government information policy, through the increasingly sophisticated technologies deployed by different federal agencies (see Table 1), led to many novel techniques on how to model or visualize geographic data. Both private and public researchers used these technological breakthroughs in geospatial analysis to examine ways American society could grapple with complex problems in the area of health, economics, national security, natural disasters, among other pressing public needs. The fruits of this public investment and research began to involve many of the vexing problems inherent in national public decision making across uncertain cultural, physical, political, or economic conditions. Rather than distinguishing between GIScience and GIS, this paper merges the public use of these academic perspectives into the collective term of "spatial information policies." With a much finer sense of understanding how these human and natural events played out through time and space, GIScience and GIS enjoy separate (but significantly related) intellectual traditions drawn from a number of academic disciplines. However, when one thinks about each in the context of federal government policy over the last fifty years, it is easier to focus on a shared emphasis to explain "reality" within a measurable spatial context, as well as resolve practical problems.