Geospatial Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities

Geospatial big data refers to spatial data sets exceeding capacity of current computing systems. A significant portion of big data is actually geospatial data, and the size of such data is growing rapidly at least by 20% every year. In this paper, we explore the challenges and opportunities which geospatial big data brought us. Several case studies are introduced to show the importance and benefits of the analytics of geospatial big data, including fuel and time saving, revenue increase, urban planning, and health care. Then, we introduce new emerging platforms for sharing the collected geospatial big data and for tracking human mobility via mobile devices. The researchers in academia and industry have spent a lot of efforts to improve the value of geospatial big data as well as take advantage of its value. Along the same line, we present our current research activities toward the analytics of geospatial big data, especially on interactive analytics of real-time or dynamic data.