Artificial Intelligence and GIS: Mutual Meeting and Passing

During last ten years there is significant convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and geographic information systems (GIS). Artificial intelligence provides sophisticated techniques for GIS projects while GIS is a powerful technology with the vast data sets and wide scope of applications for AI. Although there is increasing amount of scientific publications treating AI in GIS, the general concept of both research and applied goals is still missing. The paper comments relationships between artificial intelligence and geographic information systems critically. Two AI methods widely used in GIS - artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic-are mainly discussed. The author summarize current situation in related common topics of AI and GIS and identify further step and directions for research in geographic information science.