NSF 2016 - NSF Workshop on Geospatial Data Science in the Era of Big Data and CyberGIS

The complexity, diversity, and rapid growth of geospatial data have increased significantly over recent decades and are driving discoveries in a large number of application and science domains. Access to and interaction with geospatial big data collected from numerous sources are increasingly fundamental to explore natural, human and social systems at unprecedented scales and provide tremendous opportunities to gain dynamic insight into complex phenomena through big compute (e.g. cloud and high-performance computing) and cyberGIS approaches. CyberGIS (geographic information science and systems (GIS) based on advanced cyberinfrastructure) represents new-generation GIS in the era of big data, and has emerged during the past several years as a vibrant interdisciplinary field. Though geospatial big data have played important roles in many domains and promise to enable a wide range of decision-making practices with significant societal impacts, geospatial data science remains to be established for advancing leading-edge research and education in the era of big data and cyberGIS.
The primary goal of this workshop is to bring together thought leaders and cutting-edge researchers from pertinent multidisciplinary communities to explore the frontiers of geospatial data science. Specifically, the two-day workshop aims to:
Introduce geospatial big data capabilities (e.g., LiDAR, remote sensing, and location-based social media) for novel applications (e.g., urban sustainability and interdisciplinary studies);
Demonstrate cutting-edge cloud computing and cyberGIS tools for scalable spatial data synthesis and enhancing knowledge discovery power based on geospatial big data;
Identify spatial data synthesis requirements from representative science drivers;
Formulate a core set of questions and problems of geospatial data science; and
Discuss foundations and principles of geospatial data science.