“A growing number of GIS users -- ecologists, land use planners, and many others -- would probably profess (as one recently did to me) that a GIS is simply one of the data management tools they use -- in the same category as spreadsheet software. However, there are a number of institutional issues related to GIS and methodological issues related to spatial data analysis that distinguish it from other data storage support tools (spreadsheet, database software)”.
I think there is an uneven acceptance, or even awareness, or spatial
perspectives in the other disciplines whose literature I read (ecology,
forestry, wildlife biology, conservation biology, landscape ecology, remote
sensing). On the one hand, sophisticated treatments by spatial analysts
in ecology, etc., on the other hand this notion that spatial data are like
any other data and GIS is a glorified database management system for holding
those data. GISs have made spatial data widely available to physical
scientists without necessarily making spatial analysis widely available.