Geographic information science or
Geographical information science (
GIScience) is the scientific discipline that studies data structures and computational techniques to capture, represent, process, and analyze geographic information. It can be contrasted with
geographic information systems, which are software tools. British geographer
Michael Goodchild has defined this area in the 1990s, and summarized its core interests, including spatial analysis, visualization, and the representation of uncertainty. GIScience is conceptually related to
geography,
information science,
computer science,
geomatics and
geoinformatics, but it claims the status of an independent scientific discipline.