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Research Foundations and Standards Backbone

This book should be curated against a durable research and standards backbone. The goal is not to cite everything ever written about geospatial technology, but to make sure each chapter rests on recognized science, engineering practice, and current standards.

Core Scientific Ideas

  • Spatial dependence and spatial autocorrelation: nearby things often resemble each other more than distant things, but "near" must be defined for the problem.
  • Scale and resolution: spatial results change when the unit of analysis, grid size, map scale, or temporal window changes.
  • Coordinate reference systems: coordinates are meaningful only inside a CRS, datum, axis convention, and unit system.
  • Measurement uncertainty: location, classification, elevation, imagery, and model outputs all carry uncertainty.
  • Topology and geometry: geometric coordinates and topological relationships are related but not interchangeable.
  • Data lineage: geospatial data must preserve source, date, transformation, licensing, and fitness-for-use metadata.
  • Ethical use: location data can expose people, communities, resources, infrastructure, and sensitive ecological or cultural sites.

Foundational Literature to Revisit

  • Ptolemy, Claudius. Geography. Ancient coordinate-based geographic thinking.
  • Snow, John. On the Mode of Communication of Cholera. 1855. Early spatial epidemiology and evidence mapping.
  • Minard, Charles Joseph. Carte Figurative des Pertes Successives.... 1869. Classic multivariate spatial visualization.
  • Tobler, Waldo R. "Automation and Cartography." 1959. Early automated cartography.
  • Tobler, Waldo R. "A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth in the Detroit Region." 1970. Spatial dependence and the first law of geography.
  • McHarg, Ian L. Design with Nature. 1969. Overlay thinking and environmental planning.
  • Anselin, Luc. "Local Indicators of Spatial Association--LISA." 1995. Local spatial autocorrelation and exploratory spatial data analysis.
  • Goodchild, Michael F. "Geographical Information Science." 1992. GIScience as a research field.
  • Roberts, David R., et al. "Cross-validation strategies for data with temporal, spatial, hierarchical, or phylogenetic structure." 2017. Spatially aware model validation.
  • Janowicz, Krzysztof, et al. "GeoAI: Spatially explicit artificial intelligence techniques for geographic knowledge discovery and beyond." 2020. GeoAI framing.

Current Standards and Technical References

  • OGC API standards: modern web-native geospatial API building blocks using HTTP, JSON, REST, and OpenAPI patterns.
  • OGC API - Features: standard API building blocks for querying feature-level data.
  • PROJ: coordinate operations, projections, conversions, and datum transformations.
  • PostGIS: spatial extension for PostgreSQL with geometry storage, spatial predicates, functions, and GiST-based indexing.
  • GDAL/OGR: raster and vector data access, transformation, and format conversion.
  • STAC: cataloging specification for spatiotemporal assets, especially Earth observation.
  • Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF: HTTP-friendly GeoTIFF layout for cloud-native raster access.
  • GeoParquet: columnar geospatial format for analytics and cloud-native data engineering.
  • H3 and S2: hierarchical global spatial indexing systems for aggregation, search, and scalable analytics.

Editorial Rule for Chapters

Each chapter should eventually answer:

  • What scientific or mathematical idea supports this topic?
  • What standards or commonly accepted engineering practices shape it?
  • What can go wrong if the reader applies the idea without understanding assumptions?
  • Which primary sources, official documentation, or peer-reviewed research should the reader use for deeper study?

Sources Checked in This Pass

  • OGC API - Features Standard. Open Geospatial Consortium, https://www.ogc.org/publications/standard/ogcapi-features/. Accessed 9 May 2026.
  • OGC Standards. Open Geospatial Consortium, https://www.ogc.org/standards/. Accessed 9 May 2026.
  • PROJ Coordinate Operations. PROJ, https://proj.org/en/stable/operations/index.html. Accessed 9 May 2026.
  • PROJ Transformations. PROJ, https://proj.org/en/stable/operations/transformations/index.html. Accessed 9 May 2026.
  • PostGIS Official Manual. PostGIS, https://postgis.net/documentation/manual/. Accessed 9 May 2026.
  • DuckDB Spatial Extension. DuckDB, https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/spatial/overview.html. Accessed 9 May 2026.
  • H3 Introduction. H3Geo, https://h3geo.org/docs/. Accessed 9 May 2026.
  • Landsat. NASA Science, https://science.nasa.gov/mission/landsat/. Accessed 9 May 2026.
  • GeoParquet Specification. GeoParquet, https://geoparquet.org/. Accessed 9 May 2026.
  • SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog Specification. STAC, https://stacspec.org/. Accessed 9 May 2026.