The National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) was founded in 1988 and hosted at three member campuses: The University of California, Santa Barbara; the State University of New York at Buffalo; and the University of Maine.
The center was founded after receiving a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Ron Abler—then at NSF—described the rationale for the NCGIA and compared it to corresponding efforts in the UK. Notable faculty involved with the NCGIA include Michael Goodchild, Michael Batty, David Mark, A. Stewart Fotheringham, Andrew Frank, Helen Couclelis, Luc Anselin, Waldo R. Tobler amongst others. David William Rhind and Mike Goodchild compare later US and the UK approach.
The research plan was organized along so-called Research Initiatives, which generally started and ended with "specialist meetings", where interdisciplinary teams discussed pressing research issues. Often a publication followed:
In 1992 the list of publications resulting from these research initiatives and other efforts of the NCGIA were published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Systems.
The NCGIA produces a Core Curriculum for teaching Geographic Information Systems