GIS and Computational Notebooks

TL;DR

This paper explores how computational notebooks enhance GIS workflows by improving integration, data access, and reproducibility, positioning them as vital tools in modern geospatial science.

Contribution

It introduces the use of computational notebooks in GIS, highlighting their architecture, benefits, and role in advancing open science and computational geography.

Findings

Notebooks improve GIS workflow efficiency.

They enhance reproducibility and extensibility in spatial analysis.

Notebooks serve as a bridge to open source geospatial tools.

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners across many disciplines have recently adopted computational notebooks to develop, document, and share their scientific workflows - and the GIS community is no exception. This chapter introduces computational notebooks in the geographical context. It begins by explaining the computational paradigm and philosophy that underlie notebooks. Next it unpacks their architecture to illustrate a notebook user's typical workflow. Then it discusses the main benefits notebooks offer GIS researchers and practitioners, including better integration with modern software, more natural access to new forms of data, and better alignment with the principles and benefits of open science. In this context, it identifies notebooks as the glue that binds together a broader ecosystem of open source packages and transferable platforms for computational geography. The chapter concludes with a brief illustration of using notebooks for a set of basic GIS operations. Compared to traditional desktop GIS, notebooks can make spatial analysis more nimble, extensible, and reproducible and have thus evolved into an important component of the geospatial science toolkit.