Big Data and Generalized GIS

Abstract

The development of an ubiquitous computing infrastructure and data processing technologies are giving birth to big data,and the continuous refining of the spatial-temporal granularities of big data speeds up the generalization of geo-spatial information.In this paper,the distinctive characteristics of generalized geo-spatial information are investigated,and the urgent need for a more generalized concept of GIS are clarified.Then the technical challenges for general GIS are set forward in terms of data collection and cleaning,data management and integration,and data analysis and computing.The progress is summarized and the research issues are discussed in geo-spatial data collection with Internet text mining,moving object database,dynamic and heterogeneous data management,moving trajectory data mining,and complex network analysis.The fusion of geocomputation,urban computing and social computing in the near future is considered at the end of the paper.