FAQ

Becky Vandewalle, a Ph.D. student in Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who works with I-GUIDE Director Shaowen Wang, offer answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about I-GUIDE.
What is I-GUIDE?

The Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) is an interdisciplinary intercollegiate institute supported by the National Science Foundation that brings together people who are working on a wide variety of geospatial problems. I-GUIDE combines geospatial-related expertises and resources to achieve things that couldn’t be done individually.

There are many challenges to working with geospatial data. These challenges involve handling data, computing, finding people with the know-how to work with the data, getting ideas together, and figuring out what insights and solutions can be pursued. Geospatial problem solving is inherently interdisciplinary — it’s basically anything that’s got a geographic or spatial component. That’s the cool thing about this area: We are all doing geospatial work but using very different methods and data sources. This allows us to tackle these challenging problems because we have people looking at them with different perspectives.

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