A GIScience Perspective on the Uncertainty of Context

Geographers have long sought to understand and explain geographic phenomena through their dependence on the properties of site and situation. Yet the characterization of situation or context is fraught with numerous forms of uncertainty, related to data, the selection of situation variables, the geographic scale and extent of context, and the concept of context itself. Research into the uncertainties of geographic information has advanced substantially over the past three decades. New geographic information system techniques are becoming available that allow greater freedom to hypothesize about scale and extent, and new creative approaches to privacy protection might allow greater access in the future to fine-resolution data.