STEP towards responsible GIScience: pillars, purposes, and challenges

GIScience is crucial for spatial understanding, analysis, and decision-making across multiple sectors. As GIScience demonstrates its continual impact in addressing critical societal and environmental challenges, growing concerns regarding its responsible use rise accordingly. The integration of vast and intricate datasets and the application of translucent algorithms hold the potential to infringe on privacy, perpetuate biases, exacerbate societal inequities, or undermine reliability. This work integrates responsible thinking with GIScience by conceptualizing Responsible GIScience and proposes the STEP (Security, Trustworthiness, Equity, Philanthropy) framework, which organizes the core concerns of Responsible GIScience into four interacting pillars. A collection of subtopics is identified and categorized for each pillar through an integrative review of the literature and trending issues. The framework offers definitions and descriptions of the subtopics, summarizes current solutions, rekindles missing parts, demonstrates the cruxes, and translates abstract values into example measurable indicators and workflow checkpoints. The role of Responsible GIScience is elaborated by Protection, Instruction, Promotion, Evolution, and future research directions and challenges are discussed. This work stands at the intersection of GIScience, AI, and Big Data, as well as other interdisciplinary fields, and sheds light on a potential pathway to ensure GIScience proceeds responsibly. It calls for attention from GIScience professionals and advocates a transformation of more inclusive education, the establishment of new regulations, and joint efforts of a broader audience to secure this long-term agenda.