GIScience Research at the 2015 Esri International User Conference

The first six articles in this issue of Transactions in GIS were gathered from a call for abstracts and will be presented in two research sessions scheduled on the third day of the 2015 Esri International User Conference to be held in San Diego, California. A total of 22 abstracts were submitted and nine were selected by the journal editors for preparation as full journal articles. Each of the manuscripts has been through the usual journal peer review process and the final versions of the six research articles included in this special issue have been revised in light of both the reviewer’s and the editor’s feedback. The six articles selected for publication cover a wide range of topics and address some of the fundamental concepts and applications of geographic information science from a variety of perspectives. The first documents the need for better metrics and models for measuring dynamic interactions in ecology; the second describes how sensors and mobile devices in cars can be used by the drivers to gather geographic information so we can learn more about driving patterns and the accompanying environmental impacts; the third proposes some new methods for quantifying and communicating the uncertainty associated with spatial data; the fourth describes how semantics-enabled and Linked-Data-driven geoportals can improve the discovery of geographic information resources; the fifth describes some of the user interaction patterns and experiences with Harvard’s open source WorldMap online mapping application; and the sixth and final article offers an assessment of the geographic information science and technology (GIS&T) workforce demands across Europe, a survey conducted as part of a larger effort to update the first edition of the GIS&T Body of Knowledge (BoK) (DiBiase et al. 2006). All six articles highlight, in one way or another, the steadily increasing value of geographic information and the burgeoning role of geographic information science as an enabling science across a growing number of disciplines and application domains. The first article, by Jennifer A Miller, borrows from the null hypothesis approach commonly used in community ecology and compares six currently used dynamic interaction metrics using data on five brown hyena dyads in northern Botswana. The results show how the characterization of the dynamic interactions varies widely depending on the specific metric and null model that is chosen. This work is timely, given the fundamental shift in the types and volumes of animal movement data now being collected, and the results demonstrate why further research on methods for measuring and interpreting spatial dynamic interactions is urgently required. The second article, by Arne Br€ oring, Albert Remke, Christoph Stach, Christian Autermann, Matthes Rieke and Jakob M€ ollers, describes the enviroCar platform for collecting geographic data acquired from automobile sensors and openly providing those data for further processing and analysis. The approach uses a low-cost On-Board Diagnostics (OBD-II) adaptor and an Android smartphone to gather and share various kinds of sensor data. This particular article, which builds on the authors’ previous work, focuses on the description of the spatiotemporal RESTful Web Service interface and the underlying data model that was specifically designed for handling the mobile sensor data.