State-of-the-Art in Spatial Information Science

Dear Colleagues,

Photogrammetry, remote sensing and the spatial information sciences have witnessed great changes over the last few years towards the 3D representation, processing and simulation of big data. The reasons for this development are, on the one hand, new societal and political challenges such as a stronger and more elaborated quest for sustainable development, a globally increasing urban population, a more apparent sense of safety and security, and an increased globalisation, visible for example in the mobility of people, goods, capital and education. On the other hand, innovation in this field has been strongly influenced by progress in information and communication technology, which can be summarized in terms of ubiquitous computing, geo-sensor networks, 3D geospatial data infrastructures, digital earth, geospatial big data, cloud computing, web 2.0, the internet of things, and crowd sourcing.

These developments have had a profound impact on the theory and development of the spatial information sciences and the operational use of spatial information, which relates to one of the three main ISPRS scientific interests. With ever increasing amounts of spatial data collected by new sensors such as 3D cameras, interferometric SAR sensors and flash lasers and through crowdsourcing, new methodologies for automatic information and knowledge extraction through data sciences (e.g., data mining, machine learning, deep learning) and ontologies, semantics and knowledge representation for geospatial information have been developed to boost a large variety of new applications such as 3D virtual environments, city analytics and simulation, urban mobility, autonomous and assisted driving, indoor/outdoor modelling, augmented virtual reality and geo-computation, as well as advanced applications in smart cites.  

This Special Issue, as part of the preparation for 2020 ISPRS Congress, will review and document recent developments in spatial information science with a focus on multi-dimensional (3D, 4D, 5D ...) representations, geospatial big spatial data processing and applications, in addition to research spanning the theoretical foundations of spatial information science, through computation with spatial information, to technologies for spatial information use. High-quality contributions are invited in the form of comprehensive scientific review papers and position papers that address the state-of-the-art in a particular branch of spatial information science. Papers targeting more recently developed fields or research directions are especially welcome.

Papers must be original contributions, not previously published or submitted to other journals. Papers published or submitted for publication in conference proceedings may be considered if they are considerably extended and improved. Authors must use the provided Microsoft Word template or LaTeX template to prepare their manuscript and must follow the instructions for authors at http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijgi/instructions.

Please send an email to the Guest Editors (snli@ryerson.ca) to let us know your interest in contributing a paper as soon as possible, preferably with a tentative title and a brief abstract.

Prof. Dr. Songnian Li
Prof. Dr. Sisi Zlatanova
Prof. Dr. Maria Antonia Brovelli
Prof. Dr. Monika Sester
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.