International Journal of

Geo-Information

Editorial
Spatial Data Science
Fernando Bacao 1, *, Maribel Yasmina Santos 2 and Martin Behnisch 3
1 NOVA Information Management School (NOVA IMS), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Campus de
Campolide, 1070-312 Lisboa, Portugal
2 Department of Information Systems, Campus de Azurém, University of Minho,
4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal; [email protected]
3 Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development, 01217 Dresden, Saxony, Germany;
[email protected]
* Correspondence: [email protected]




Received: 3 July 2020; Accepted: 6 July 2020; Published: 8 July 2020


The field of data science has had a significant impact in both academia and industry, and with
good reason. The ability to make use of large amounts of data to find solutions for pressing problems in
society, the environment, and business, constitutes both an opportunity and a challenge. The concept
of data is our best prospect to improve our understanding of the world significantly, ease the attrition
in human/environment interaction, optimize resource allocation, and mitigate human suffering
and deprivation.
Recently, there have been many examples of the “unreasonable effectiveness of data”
(Haley et al. 2009 [1]), where sizable high-quality datasets unlock the solution to difficult
and perennial problems. The ImageNet LargeScale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC)
(Russakovsky et al. 2015 [2]) is probably one of the most spectacular examples of how data can
have a pivotal role in advancing a whole field of research. The competition, that ran from 2010 to
2017, completely transformed the landscape of image recognition in a mere seven years. In this
period, the winning accuracy in the classification of objects in the dataset rose from 71.8% to 97.3%,
and the difference in the performance of the different teams drastically reduced. In the last year of
the competition, 29 of the 38 teams achieved an accuracy rate above 95% (for an interesting account
of the competition origins and development, see Gershgorn 2017 [3]). The spectacular results of this
competition promoted a paradigm shift, where data take center stage, and its impact on improving the
performance of old models and the development of new and improved ones becomes evident. After
all, the idea is to let the data do the heavy lifting (Domingos 2012 [4]), and large-high-quality datasets
proved to be up to par with the task.
The ImageNet competition example is far from being unique, as far as the relevance of data goes,
but it is especially appropriate when talking about spatial data science. In fact, the ImageNet story also
includes an interesting lesson for spatial data science, which is related to the pivotal role of convolution
neural networks in the results of the ImageNet competition. The year 2012 was a turning point with the
results achieved by AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2012 [5]), which beat the competition by a massive 10.8%
margin. This feat was probably one of the most critical events in the establishment of the deep learning
phenomenon and the (re)boost of interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence. From 2012
onwards, convolution neural networks (CNN) dominated the competition and bled into many other
areas of application. However, the compelling aspect of CNN for this Special Issue, and spatial data
science in general, is the smart way in which they take into account the spatial structure of data,
effectively encoding the first law of geography (“everything is related to everything else, but near
things are more related than distant things.” (Tobler 1970 [6])) into the algorithm.

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2020, 9, 428; doi:10.3390/ijgi9070428 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijgi

The data deluge and the consequent digital transformation processes in the economy and society [7]
also created new opportunities and challenges in the study of geographical phenomena. Due to the
plethora of georeferenced data collected today by sensors and people, the transition from theory-driven
research to data-driven research has been discussed in the literature (Miller and Goodchild 2015 [8];
“geographic research has shifted from a data-scarce to a data-rich environment”). This view is
exaggerated by the emergence of the so-called fourth paradigm of science, i.e., after experimental
science, theoretical science and computational science (simulating of complex phenomena) comes data
science (data-intensive) (Hey et al. 2009 [9]; Kitchin 2014 [10]).
While in the 1980s and 1990s, the geographic information science community debated if there
was something special in spatial data (Gahegan 2003 [11], Anselin 1990 [12] and Bação et al. 2005 [13]),
today, the question does not seem to be so relevant, as data science is forced to deal with a myriad of
data types, most of them suffering from similar pathologies as spatial data. Let us take the example
of spatial dependence, which can be seen as a particular form of dependency between observations.
The problem is not one of violating the independence assumption, as most data science methods are
essentially assumption-free. The problem is that, if we do not account for spatial dependency in the
model, the results will probably never be either very good or relevant. This is assuming that every
phenomenon is defined by a process and expressed in a context, where the process represents the
factors underlying the phenomena, and the context represents the frame in which the phenomena are
observed (e.g., space and time). Spatial dependency indicates that the context has a meaningful impact
in the process, in other words, the phenomenon in a particular location is a function of the underlying
factors, but also of the intensity of that same phenomenon in neighboring locations. This factor adds
complexity to the analysis, for it would be much simpler to concentrate our attention on the underlying
factors and assume a neutral context. This facet is the reason why spatial data science needs to produce
spatially explicit models.
The question now is what do we mean by spatially explicit models, according to (Goodchild
2001 [14]); these are not invariant under relocation, include spatial representations in their
implementations, include spatial concepts in their formulations, and the spatial structures of inputs
and outcomes are different. The important thing about spatially explicit models is that they harness
the geographic frame to produce better results, whenever space is the relevant context of expression of
the phenomenon. Therefore, building spatially explicit models in spatial data science is not so much a
philosophical question; instead, it is a utilitarian approach.
Several authors (Miller and Goodchild 2015 [8]; Li et al. 2015 [15]; Jiang and Shekhar 2017 [16])
have already highlighted that spatial data science must support decision making in a meaningful
way and not aim to replace human decisions, which are usually made by intelligence and skepticism
(see Miller and Goodchild 2015 [8]; ‘data dictatorship’). Thus, knowledge and theories of the disciplines
should not be ignored in the course of spatial analyses, because otherwise, results (e.g., patterns and
correlations in data) discovered by (big data) algorithms quickly tend to be uninteresting and less
useful (Jiang and Shekhar 2017) [17]: “Ignoring domain knowledge and theories, patterns discovered
by spatial big data science algorithms may be spurious.”
The collection of papers accepted for this Special Issue is broad and eclectic and deals with topics
that range from motion activity and trajectories to epidemic spreading. Some papers are more focused
on developing theoretical aspects, and others on real-world applications, although all of them have
reported experimental results. We are sure that the International Journal of Geo-Information reader will
find some exciting and thought-provoking ideas in this Special Issue.
The paper “Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Intense Convective Storms Tracks in a Densely Urbanized
Italian Basin” (Sangiorgio and Barindelli 2020) [17] combines both the spatial and temporal dimensions
to identify the most favorable conditions for the formation of convective events. Intense convective
storms usually produce large rainfall volumes in short time periods, leading to an increase in floods
and corresponding damages. The use of visualization solutions allows for an improved understanding
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2020, 9, 428 3 of 5

of the phenomenon and identifies the geographic areas where these convective thunderstorms are
more frequent.
The paper “Analyzing Road Coverage of Public Vehicles According to Number and Time Period
for Installation of Road Inspection Systems” (Sangiorgio et al. 2020) [18] deals with the problem of using
sensors to address the monitoring of aging road infrastructure efficiently. They focus on a methodology
to automate road inspection based on the use of a smartphone-based system and analyze the data
collected from public vehicles with a long-term global positioning system (GPS), in two Japanese cities.
The authors conclude that, with only a fraction of the public vehicles, the entire road inspection area
can be achieved efficiently.
Living in the current pandemic situation, we are all too aware of the relevance of having
appropriate spatial-temporal tools to identify, understand, and promptly react to the spread of
pathogens. Hamer et al. 2020 [19] propose papros, an R package for spatial-temporal prediction based
on local data, using various deterministic, geostatistical regionalization, and machine learning methods.
To showcase the package, the authors present a use case—based on the prediction of powdery mildew
infestation events.
Moreover, “Quantitative Identification of Urban Functions with Fishers’ Exact Test and POI
Data Applied in Classifying Urban Districts: A Case Study within the Sixth Ring Road in Beijing”
(Yi et al. 2019) [20] puts forward a quantitative methodology to identify urban functions. The authors
use Fisher’s test and point of interest (POI) data, and apply the methodology to determine the urban
districts, based on their urban functions within the Sixth Ring Road in Beijing. After the application
of a k-modes clustering algorithm, the authors identify four main groups of districts based on their
urban functions.
Dealing with trajectory data continues to be a challenge; there are still many problems to tackle in
order to be able to extract relevant and accurate knowledge from trajectory data. Pulshashi et al. [21]
propose an application to simplify trajectory data, for both batch and streaming environments, in their
paper “Simplification and Detection of Outlying Trajectories from Batch and Streaming Data Recorded
in Harsh Environments.” The application seeks to reduce noise, and especially outlying point-locations
that can mislead the analysis and alter the statistical properties of trajectories. They conclude with an
experimental evaluation of the proposed method and compare it with other outlier detection algorithms.
Finally, the last paper of this Special Issue [22] (Crivellari and Beinat 2019) uses motion traces
to build a behavioral portrait of places based on how people move between them. In their proposal,
they ignore geographical coordinates and spatial proximity, and based on the word2vec concept, create
a motion-to-vector (Mot2vec). They start by transforming the original trajectories into sequences of
locations, and then they use the skip-gram word2vec model to build the location embedding. According
to the authors, these embeddings constitute a meaningful representation of locations, “allowing a
direct way of comparing locations’ connections and providing analogous similarity distributions for
places of the same type.”
With this Special Issue of the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, based on spatial data
science, we hope to contribute to promoting the discussion and interest around the role of spatial in
data science. More importantly, we hope that this volume can be seen as a contribution to encourage
the geographic information science community to become (even more) involved, and contribute to the
advance of this exciting and thriving field.

Author Contributions: The three authors contributed equally to this work. All authors have read and agreed to
the published version of the manuscript.
Funding: This research was partially funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT),
under projects IPSTERS (DSAIPA/AI/0100/2018), and foRESTER (PCIF/SSI/0102/2017).
Acknowledgments: The guest editors would like to thank the whole editorial team and all reviewers who
provided constructive and helpful comments on the articles in our special issue.
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2020, 9, 428 4 of 5

Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the
study; in the collection, analysis, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to
publish the results.

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