| This book has been a long time in the making. The origins of the ideas in this book lie in 1990 when I attended a NATO-funded Advanced Study Institute in Las Navas del Marqués in Spain on ‘Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space’, organised by Andrew Frank and David Mark. After a long gestation, I started to write the first draft in the spring of 1995 when on a term’s sabbatical leave from Birkbeck College, London. At that, time I thought I would simply update and expand my 1989 edited collection on three-dimensional GIS. However, despite my best efforts I was unable to finish the book before returning to Birkbeck after my sabbatical. Perhaps that was for the best, as over the course of the next year doubts began to grow that my 1995 book outline was the right one. I attended the NCGIA GIS and Environmental Modelling Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico in January 1996 and I helped to organise the ESF-funded GISDATA meeting on ‘Spatial socio-economic units’ in Nafplion, Greece in May 1996, where new ‘multidimensional’ ideas took root.
The rest is history. I dipped my toe in philosophy, I gathered material on spatial and temporal representation from many disciplines outside geography and informatics, and four years went by while I developed the new outline. I eventually began writing again in earnest in the summer of 1999 and I finished the manuscript in July 2000. Over its five years of development, this book has been written in a variety of places with help from many different people. During my 1995 sabbatical, I wrote substantial parts of the book at the Environmental Spatial Analysis Group (GASA) in the New University of Lisbon, and at the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) in Santa Barbara. I would therefore like to thank Antonio Câmara of GASA and Mike Goodchild of NCGIA for their hospitality and support. I also wrote parts of the book at the Palacky University of Olomouc in the Czech Republic, at GISDATA conferences in Rostock, Nafplion and Strasbourg, at the NCGIA Initiative 21 meeting in San Antonio, at the NCGIA Varenius initiative on Discovering Geographic Knowledge and backstage at the Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town! Fittingly, given the location of the case studies in part II, some of the book has even been written in the Hut on Scolt Head Island! |
