The Bottom-Up Approach and De-mapping Direction of GIS

We see that GIS is under amajor expansion of incorporatingmore bottomup methods. The bottom-up approach does not seek to build general/global and therefore likely complicated and delicate models or problem solvers. Instead, it employs local and simple operations, and resorts to intensive computation to achieve the global solution. The burgeoning and adoption of the bottom-up approach are motivated by the contemporary application problems dealt with by GIS, featuring complex systems and high uncertainty, and facilitated by the explosive advancement of modern computing capacity.We use problems of classification, assessment, estimation, and prediction to illustrate the distinction between the top-down and bottom-up approaches. We also point out that an outcome of this new expansion of GIS is that mapping is receding from its center-stage position in GIS.