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This Question arises from a Question about the analysis tag. There I suggested that and are used here in a way that could possibly lead to them being synonyms. This led to discussion about whether is actually broader than , or vice versa.

At the moment our tag wiki for geoprocessing says:

Geoprocessing is a GIS operation used to manipulate GIS data.

"... A typical geoprocessing operation takes an input dataset, performs an operation on that dataset, and returns the result of the operation as an output dataset. Common geoprocessing operations include geographic feature overlay, feature selection and analysis, topology processing, raster processing, and data conversion." --Wikipedia

Perhaps we can start to make some headway by either editing the tag wiki for geoprocessing to make it equivalent to the Geoprocessing Framework of ArcGIS or coin a new tag of to do that. I suspect that if we do the latter the former tag will probably be used any way and so I am inclined not to coin the new tag.

Would you be happy/OK to have represent only questions about the Geoprocessing Framework of ArcGIS? If so, we can then return to disambiguating the remainder of what currently gets tagged as analysis/geoprocessing.

Personally, I am hoping for a A real solution to ambiguous tags to be implemented.

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    While Geoprocessing sounds quite vendor neutral, I've never heard it being used without it being a reference to ESRI's framework. I don't know whether this is just a result of the kind of people I deal with, or whether this is an Industry-wide practice. Maybe those who work exclusively on software other than ESRI, might be in a better position to throw some light on this.
    – Devdatta Tengshe
    Commented Dec 13, 2013 at 11:19
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    One Answer to this Question has a picture of a QGIS menu that suggests the term Geoprocessing term is used there but in a much narrower sense than in ArcGIS.
    – PolyGeo Mod
    Commented Dec 13, 2013 at 11:30
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    I always assumed it was much narrower simply because QGIS hasn't (yet) implemented a full suite of such tools. :-) Your evidence is clear, however: "geoprocessing" has been appropriated as a term of art outside the ESRI sphere and thereby attains a generic meaning that ought to be reflected in our use of the geoprocessing tag.
    – whuber Mod
    Commented Dec 13, 2013 at 15:49
  • I've known of the term Geoprocessing since the late 1970s: it was the name of an academic journal, edited by Tom Poiker (formerly Peucker), on any aspect of digital geographic data processing. (The term "geospatial" had not been proposed back then.) It ran for about 10 years. I did not even know "geoprocessing" was being used by Esri in a narrow sense, and strongly object to words/terms having their meaning changed, even if inadvertently, by large organizations.
    – Martin F
    Commented Dec 18, 2013 at 23:03

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I think is a general term which is not exclusive to ESRI software at all.

Therefore I would welcome a new tag which would be ESRI-specific.

Similarly, I would support renaming which currently describes the QGIS "Processing" (formerly Sextante) plugin to .

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    I've known of the term Geoprocessing since the late 1970s: it was the name of an academic journal, edited by Tom Poiker (formerly Peucker), on any aspect of digital geographic data processing. (The term "geospatial" had not been proposed back then.) It ran for about 10 years. I did not even know "geoprocessing" was being used by Esri in a narrow sense, and strongly object to words/terms having their meaning changed, even if inadvertently, by large organizations.
    – Martin F
    Commented Dec 18, 2013 at 22:44
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    I agree - and discussion at meta.gis.stackexchange.com/questions/3373/… suggests the community might be more or less behind you on the qgis-processing tag idea.
    – PolyGeo Mod
    Commented Dec 19, 2013 at 0:35
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I went looking through the tags, and we already have which is specifically for the Processing toolbox in QGIS:

Spatial data processing framework that brings advanced analysis capabilities to QGIS.

I would normally say that geoprocessing is a general term and it should apply to concept no matter which application is in use, but it's already been separated out for QGIS. So it may be more appropriate to alter the tag to be ArcGIS specific.

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