GIS Software and Engineering for Big Data

Dear Colleagues,

The increasing spread and usage of big data is changing the way data are managed and analyzed. The capabilities of traditional GIS (geographical information system) software are often limited in dealing with big data challenges, such as versatile data forms, steaming processing, large scale parallel computing, and dynamic mapping and visualization. Significant improvements are needed in innovative software development and engineering applications of GIS. First, GIS needs to be extended to accommodate dynamic observations of sensors including volunteered geographic information (VGI). Second, new data models and indexing algorithms are needed to store and access unstructured, multidimensional, and dynamic data. Third, the computing paradigm calls for innovation to meet the demands of stream processing, real-time analysis, and information extraction from large-scale datasets. Fourth, novel methods in mapping and visualization shall be studied to dynamically display, analyze, and simulate geographical phenomena and their progresses. Finally, data mining and analysis technologies for big geospatial data deserve further research to perform data, information, and knowledge transformations.

As a result, the GIS software and engineering domain has seen increasing applications for advanced information technologies, such as the map/reduce computing paradigm, stream processing, NoSQL/NewSQL, block chain, and artificial intelligence technologies. This Special Issue intends to collect the latest and future directions in GIS software development and engineering applications to deal with spatio-temporal big data. We invite authors to submit their original papers. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Data and computational architecture of GIS
• Internet of Things and sensor observations in GIS
• High-performance geo-computation and geo-stream processing
• Geospatial data model and data cube
• Workflow and provenance
• Distributed and scalable geospatial database
• Web GIS and geospatial services
• Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality(AR) GIS
• Spatio-temporal big data visualization
• Knowledge representation in GIS
• Artificial intelligence in GIS
• Block chain for GIS
• GIS tools and applications for big data

Prof. Dr. Peng Yue
Prof. Dr. Danielle Ziebelin
Dr. Yaxing Wei
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.