Perspectives on the nature of geospatial information

In the first issue of this year, our editor-in-chief wrote an inspiring Editorial about the 20 years’ history of this journal. That forms a nice background to this Special Issue, in that he gave a very good overview of the journal’s aims and scope, and an interesting summary of geospatial information science, as well as some challenges for the future. During this 20th anniversary year, we will be producing two Special Issues to mark this auspicious occasion. It is a great pleasure that I am writing this guest editorial for the first of these two Special 20th Anniversary Issues for our journal on the subject of “Perspectives on the nature of geospatial information”. Since the introduction of remote sensing in the 1960s, of GIS in the 1970s, followed by GPS, and geospatial information technology, such technologies now permeate in all aspects of people’s daily lives. The advent of smartphones, social media, the cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and automation, virtual reality, and several others have enabled many location-based services and other geospatial services to be used in construction, industry, commerce, agriculture, defense and security, disaster management, agriculture as well as many other application areas. The theme of this Special Issue, “Perspectives on the nature of geospatial information” was especially selected to show the wide range of different perspectives, approaches to, and applications of geospatial information. In this issue, we have included major contributions of the leading geospatial information science practitioners and organizations that have shaped this dynamic field. There are 13 papers in it, with authors coming from 13 countries, showing the truly international nature of this journal. We have some excellent review papers on policy, at the global and national levels, as well as overview/status papers with various perspectives on the nature of geospatial information. These include technical, educational, commercial, industrial, security, scientific perspectives on the nature of geospatial information, as well as on geospatial standards issues, in addition to some application examples. The papers also cover many different parts of the world.