Aims and scope

The aim of International Journal of Geographical Information Science is to provide a forum for the exchange of original ideas, approaches, methods and experiences in the field of GIScience.

International Journal of Geographical Information Science covers the following topics:

    Innovations and novel applications of GIScience in natural resources, social systems and the built environment
    Relevant developments in computer science, cartography, surveying, geography, and engineering
    Fundamental and computational issues of geographic information
    The design, implementation and use of geographical information for monitoring, prediction and decision making
    Novel geospatial approaches to address one or more of the UN SDGs

The journal publishes original articles, reviews, foresight papers, technical communications, editorials and book reviews.

International Journal of Geographical Information Science operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. It does not consider manuscripts with copies deposited in preprint servers that disclose the authors' identities before acceptance for publication. Authors can choose to publish gold open access within this journal.

Special Issue on Extracting and analysing geographic information from natural language texts
Submission Date: 2024-09-30

Special Issue Editor(s)

Xuke Hu, German Aerospace Center
xuke.hu@dlr.de

Ross Purves, University of Zurich
ross.purves@geo.uzh.ch

Ludovic Moncla, INSA Lyon
ludovic.moncla@insa-lyon.fr

Jens Kersten, German Aerospace Center
Jens.Kersten@dlr.de

Kristin Stock, Massey University
K.Stock@massey.ac.nz

The Theme and Scope

In an age inundated with semi- and unstructured natural language texts—ranging from news articles and scientific publications through historical records and literary works to social media—a hidden treasure trove of geographic information awaits exploration. This vast array of texts, often containing toponyms, place attributes, and complex location descriptions, offers a unique lens through which to view our world. The extraction and analysis of this geographic information hold immense potential across various fields, ranging from sociolinguistics and spatial humanities to geographic search, disaster management, urban planning, disease surveillance, landscape characterization, and tourism planning. For instance, extracting geographic information from texts has facilitated the timely mapping of situational information during disasters, offered insights into how demographics, environment, and biology influence the emergence of global infectious diseases, and unveiled the spatial structures of narrative within fictional novels. Researchers in geographic information science, information retrieval, and natural language processing have made significant strides in developing methods to understand the geographic focus of documents, extract geographic references from unstructured and heterogeneous texts, and resolve these references unambiguously to specific locations or continuous gridded representations of the Earth’s surface.

In 2008 IJGIS published a special issue on Geographic Information Retrieval, a field specifically concerned with extracting and analysing geographic information from unstructured text with a focus on information retrieval and search. In that special issue, Jones and Purves (2008) set out a range of challenges almost all of which are still relevant today. In the intervening years, natural language has come to be seen as an important source of information for a wide range of geographically relevant research questions, with special issues exploring, for example, the geospatial humanities (Murrieta-Flores and  Martins, 2019) and spatial cognition (Stock et al., 2022) taking advantage of methods developed in Geographic Information Retrieval to extract and analyse information for a range of purposes beyond search.

Despite these notable advances, ensuring the reliability and applicability of methods continues to pose significant challenges. For example, the scarcity of digital resources and language complexity hinders extracting geographic information from minority languages. Similarly, in regions with limited coverage in geographic gazetteers, the accurate resolution of geographic references remains a formidable task and can increase existing biases. Moreover, resolving historical or ancient toponyms requires interdisciplinary approaches, considering place name evolution, spelling variations, and limited historical data. Understanding complex location descriptions, like 'behind the large mural, two blocks from City Hall, near the farmers market,' is particularly difficult due to their reliance on implicit local knowledge and spatial language ambiguity.

The recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 offers promising advancements but also faces significant hurdles, including lack of transparency, inherent bias in training data, high computational needs, and difficulties in maintaining consistency across diverse languages and cultures. Lastly, there is a critical need for varied and sophisticated methodologies tailored to specific applications, which may include balancing accuracy with processing speed, offering multilingual support, or adapting to constraints in computational resources.

This special issue provides a central platform for scholars and researchers to convene and explore the extraction and analysis of geographic information found in texts. While we emphasize LLMs' pivotal role, our primary focus is to facilitate inclusive discussions, promote innovative research, and invite valuable contributions from experts active across diverse fields in this domain.

Topics Include, But Are Not Limited To:

    New approaches in document geocoding, toponym recognition, and toponym resolution to enhance reliability and applicability
    Scalability and resource-efficient use of LLMs in geographic information extraction and analysis
    Optimization of resource utilization and computational efficiency in geographic information extraction and analysis pipelines
    Multimodal data fusion for method improvement
    Geographic information extraction from underrepresented languages and regions
    Interdisciplinary approaches for historical and ancient toponym interpretation
    Advanced techniques for disambiguating complex location descriptions and spatial relations
    Representation and analysis of geographic information in texts
    Novel applications of text-based geographic information

References

Jones, C. B., & Purves, R. S. (2008). Geographical information retrieval. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 22(3), 219-228.

Murrieta-Flores, P., & Martins, B. (2019). The geospatial humanities: past, present and future. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 33(12), 2424-2429.

Stock, K., Jones, C. B., & Tenbrink, T. (2022). Speaking of location: a review of spatial language research. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 22(3-4), 185-224.

Special Issue on Emerging Opportunities and Challenges of Human Dynamics Research
Submission Date: 2024-11-30

Special Issue Editor(s)

Shih-Lung Shaw, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
sshaw@utk.edu

Daniel Sui, Virginia Tech
dsui20@vt.edu

Xinyue Ye, Texas A&M University
xinyue.ye@tamu.edu

Human dynamics research, augmented by the increasingly data-rich environment of the mobile and big data era, has brought up new opportunities and challenges. It is critical for both geographic information systems (GIS) and geographic information science (GIScience) to properly consider, represent, and model human dynamics, which is defined as all kinds of human activities and interactions in the ever-evolving hybrid physical-virtual world. The new level integration and synthesis are essential for developing theoretical and conceptual aspects of GIScience and fulfilling the application needs of GIS. A special issue on “Human Dynamics in the Mobile and Big Data Era” was published by IJGIS in 2016 which has received many citations. There will be the 10th Symposium on Human Dynamics Research organized as part of the AAG Meeting in Hawaii in April 2024.  We welcome your participation in the Symposium at 2024 AAG Meeting, but this call for papers is open to all researchers regardless of your participation in the Symposium. This special issue is intended to reflect the latest progress of human dynamics research in GIScience and discusses future directions and prospects of making GIScience and GIS more relevant to the key challenges and changes we are facing such as climate change, sustainability, artificial intelligence, quantum turn, and metaverse. We welcome contributions that cover conceptual/theoretical, technological/methodological, as well as educational/social aspects of new human dynamics research in GIScience.

The scope of this special issue includes, but not limited to, topics such as:

    Human-robot/machine Interactions and the role of generative AI in reshaping human dynamics
    Ethical considerations and privacy concerns in human dynamics research
    Integrating urban digital twins and human dynamics research
    Human dynamics beyond activities in physical space
    Reconceptualization of humans as wave functions and the study of human dynamics from the perspective of emerging quantum social science
    Open science and human dynamics research
    Reproducibility and replicability issues in human dynamics research