Thinking spatial

Mohamed F Mokbel

doi:10.5311/josis.2020.21.719

Abstract

The systems community in both academia and industry has tremendous success in building widely used general purpose systems for various types of data and applications. Examples include database systems, big data systems, data streaming systems, and machine learning systems. The vast majority of these systems are ill equipped in terms of supporting spatial data. The main reason is that system builders mostly think of spatial data as just one more type of data. Any spatial support can be considered as an afterthought problem that can be supported via on-top functions or spatial cartridges that can be added to the already built systems. This article advocates that spatial data and applications need to be natively supported in special purpose systems, where spatial data is considered as a first class citizen, while spatial operations are built inside the engine rather than on-top of it. System builders should consider spatial data while building their systems. The article gives examples of five categories of systems, namely, database systems, big data systems, machine learning systems, recommender systems, and social network systems, that would benefit tremendously, in terms of both accuracy and performance, when considering spatial data as an integral part of the system engine.

Highlights

JOSIS, as Mike Worboys put it in his editorial introducing the first issue ten years ago, is “an online publication and all articles are free to access for any person” [17]
We asked all members of our editorial board to write vision pieces showing the diversity of ways in which our field can contribute to both basic science and major societal challenges
Some editorial board members chose to write their piece alone; others asked colleagues to contribute. These are diverse, and they span a range of topics

Summary

Introduction

JOSIS, as Mike Worboys put it in his editorial introducing the first issue ten years ago, is “an online publication and all articles are free to access for any person” [17]. Climate change has become a climate emergency, biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people have been recognized as important contributors to Sustainable Development Goals1, easy access to locationenabled devices in many people’s pockets has changed the way that societies operate, and most recently, a global pandemic has impacted on all of our lives. All of these events bring into sharp focus the ways in which the data, technologies, and methods we work on can be used for good.

Results

Conclusion