Ethics in GIScience: Conflicts Across the Geodata Lifecycle

Abstract

As geographic information systems (GIS) become deeply integrated into public, private, and academic domains, ethical considerations have shifted from the periphery to central concerns and challenges within the field of GIScience. Despite an extensive body of work spanning several decades, existing literature treats ethical issues in isolation, leading to a fragmented understanding of how these conflicts interact across real-world geodata flows. This thesis addressed this gap by systematically identifying ethical conflicts within GISscience and proposed a geospatial ethics framework. Using the geospatial data lifecycle (GDL) as a structuring tool, this thesis positioned the identified ethical conflicts within the stages of collection, processing, analysis, preservation, and dissemination of geospatial data. The methodology employed a systematic literature review to explore how ethical conflicts are discussed in relation to the GDL. This was validated through semi-structured interviews with academic, public, private, and individual actors to examine the framework's conceptual validity and practical relevance. The results showed that privacy-related conflicts are the most prevalent and persistent conflicts in the systematic literature and the validation of the geospatial ethics framework. While practitioners generally recognised the conflicts that were not related to privacy, a gap was observed between abstract academic terminology and the pragmatic, operational terms used in professional practice. The study concluded that the framework served as a valuable educational tool and a source of shared terminologies, particularly for those new to the GIS field.