Geographical Information Science

Abstract

Geographical information science is the scientific discipline that studies to capture, process, analysis, transmit, store, and manage the geographical information with fast, mass volume, and high fidelity modern technologies. Geographical information science in NSFC includes remote sensing, geographical information system (GIS), surveying and mapping. The analysis in this chapter is based on 37 SCI/SSCI mainstream journals and 4 CSCD core journals in geographical information science. Geographical information science gets full developments during the past 30 years in the fields of remote sensing platforms and sensors, remote sensing mechanisms and models, image processing, information extraction, terrain surface parameters inversion, geo-positioning, change detection, digital terrain model, etc. Comprehensive applications and supports on researches of the earth system provided by geographical information science are increasingly reinforced. The integrated application and supporting role of geographical information science continue to increase. Trends of geographical information science in China well match the global import, with specific emphases on high-resolution image acquisition, high-accuracy positioning, and land-surface information extraction. The number of publications have increased rapidly in both the SCI/SSCI mainstream journals and the CSCD journals during 1986–2015. SCI/SSCI-indexed articles published by Chinese scholars have reached 21.6 % in the last 5 years. Among the top 100 Chinese authors with the most publications in both the SCI/SSCI mainstream journals and the CSCD journals during the past 30 years, 81 % are supported by NSFC.