Integrating GIS and Internet of Things (IoT) in Sustainable Cities

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable cities are key to addressing the global challenges of urbanization, including population growth, energy efficiency, food security, waste management, and transportation planning. According to the United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects, 68% of the world’s population is projected to live in urban areas by 2050. This report notes that sustainable urbanization depends on the successful management of urban growth in order to ensure access to infrastructure and social services, adequate housing, education, health care, and a safe environment for all (United Nations 2018). The integration of geographic information systems (GIS) and the Internet of things (IoT) provides a powerful framework for designing smart, secure, and sustainable cities. Information and communication technologies (ICT), mobile devices, and location-aware sensors that are integrated in IoT networks enable person-to-object and object-to-object communication (Liu 2018).

Working Group Six of the ISPRS Commission IV (WG IV/6), “Internet of Things, SDI, and Spatial Decision Support”, announces this Special Issue of the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, entitled, “Integrating GIS and Internet of Things (IoT) in Sustainable Cities”, so as to exchange the latest innovations and developments in the integration of GIS and IoT for sustainable cities. We encourage submissions from perspectives of the thing (e.g., the state-of-art in sensors network and integration), the semantic (e.g., representing, storing, sharing, interconnecting, searching, and organizing (geo)information generated by the IoT), and the solutions (e.g., smart and connected communities, citizen science, ecological, and agricultural applications). We encourage contributions on (but not limited to) the following themes:

• Theories, frameworks, and paradigms of integrated GIS and IoT systems
• Advancements in sensor networks and integration for applications such as smart transportation, intelligent homes, inventory management, parking, bicycle sharing, energy efficiency, and green infrastructure
• Geoinformation search, retrieval, sharing, and representation from IoT, including multi-level spatial data infrastructure and web services
• Spatial decision support systems with GIS-IoT
• AI and machine learning with GIS-IoT
• IoT, big data, and analytics: challenges, solutions, and potential
• Geospatial applications of IoT in urban, ecological, health, business, and agricultural systems
• Geospatial education and capacity building efforts with GIS-IoT for sustainable cities
• Ethical and privacy considerations of IoT in urban areas
• Citizen science, crowdsourcing, and VGI for sustainable cities
• Pro-poor land management and regularization of slums for urban sustainability

Manuscripts for this exciting Special Issue should be submitted by 20 August 2021 for timely peer-review, selection, and publication in the open access journal ISPRS IJGI.

Dr. Marguerite Madden
Dr. Mingshu Wang
Dr. Dev Raj Paudyal
Dr. Giuseppina Vacca
Guest Editors

References

Liu, L., 2018. IoT and a sustainable city, Energy Procedia, 153:342-346.

United Nations, 2018. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision, Key Facts, Working Paper No. ESA/P/WP.252, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, United Nations, New York. https://population.un.org/wpp/

Prof. Dr. Madden Marguerite
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.