COSIT at Twenty: Measuring Research Trends and Interdisciplinarity Karl Grossner 1 and Benjamin Adams 2 University of California, Santa Barbara 1 Department of Geography; 2 Department of Computer Science 1 karlg@geog.ucsb.edu; 2 badams@cs.ucsb.edu Abstract. We have performed a topic classification procedure on a text corpus consisting of the proceedings for all ten meetings of the Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) held between 1992 and 2009, providing a measure with which to answer several kinds of questions about the dynamic conceptual content of that conference series. We have identified topics trending upward and downward, looking particularly at the level of research interest in cultural factors. We have also investigated whether there has been growing interdisciplinarity in the research reported at COSIT meetings by this diverse and dynamic scholarly community. Preliminary results are presented, planned future work is discussed, and additional questions are invited. 1 Introduction In the twenty years since “COSIT Zero,” the formative 1992 meeting held in Pisa, Italy, a multidisciplinary community of scholars with inter-related research interests concerning the many aspects of spatial information theory has clearly solidified to become a distinctive scholarly domain. Spatial information theory concerns a wide range of scientific issues, which have been characterized as an ordered process [1]: (i) the perception of spatiotemporal phenomena; (ii) cognitive tasks including the creation and manipulation of internal representations like concepts and cognitive maps; (iii) the creation of external representations such as formal-logical systems and maps; (iv) their implementation for advanced reasoning with computing systems; (v) the use and usability of such systems; and (vi) the communication of spatiotemporal knowledge by many means. In the published proceedings for early COSIT meetings, editors outlined some broad goals for the conference series. It was hoped that focused interdisciplinary dialog would lead to discovery of “universally valid principles” providing a “consistent basis for GIS” [2]. In 2001, Dan Montello wrote that researchers from “(several) specializations within geography, computer science, and psychology” were “increasingly sharing methods and concepts” [3]. The present milestones—ten meetings, twenty years—seem an appropriate time to look closely at the language of all papers and plenary abstracts published in COSIT proceedings, in order to identify trends in research topics and the nature and extent of interdisciplinarity. An additional question, put to us by David Mark, is whether there has been a diminishing focus on