Guest editorial: GeoStreaming

Abstract

We are entering the era of Bbig data^thanks to the exponential growth and availability of structured and unstructured data, among which a large amount are real-time streaming data emitted from sensors, imagery and mobile devices. In addition to the temporal nature of stream data, various sources provide stream data that has geographical locations and/or spatial extents, such as geotagging twitter streams, mobile GPS location streams, spatial temporal image streams, and so on. On one hand, this amount of streamed data has been a major propeller to advance the state of the art in geographic information systems. On the other hand, the ability to process, mine, and analyze that massive amount of data in a timely manner prevented researchers from making full use of the incoming stream data. GeoStreaming refers to the ongoing effort in academia and industry to process, mine and analyze stream data with geographic and spatial information.The purpose of this special issue is to showcase some of the recent developments and novel applications of GeoStreaming. The open call for GeoStreaming has attracted nine papers covering broad range of GeoStreaming technologies and applications. After two rounds of peer-reviews by a team of international experts, seven papers were selected to be included in this special issue.We start this issue with two papers focused on system design for mobility data analysis [1,2]. Trajectory analysis is of crucial importance in several fields as social analysis, zoology, climatology or traffic monitoring. Over the last decade, the number of mobile systems and Geoinformatica (2017) 21:231-235