Core concepts of spatial information for transdisciplinary research

Geographic information science is emerging from its niche ‘behind the systems’, getting ready to contribute to transdisciplinary research. To succeed, a conceptual consensus across multiple disciplines on what spatial information is and how it can be used is needed. This article proposes a set of 10 core concepts of spatial information, intended to be meaningful to scientists who are not specialists of spatial information: location, neighbourhood, field, object, network, event, granularity, accuracy, meaning, and value. Each proposed concept is briefly characterized, demonstrating the need to map between their different disciplinary uses.