Abstract: Objective In recent years,Big Data has been increasingly used to refer the coming era of informationexplosion.Industry,academia,research and government sectors all have paid more attention to bigdata.This paper provides a comprehensive review on the characteristics of and recent advances in bigdata and spatial big data.Specifically,three core concepts in GISciences,spatial analysis,spatialmodeling and spatial optimization,are addressed and discussed from the theoretical and methodologi-cal perspectives.Further,the spatial philosophy and spatial thinking underlying the spatial theoriesand methodologies are investigated.This paper ends with a discussion of the opportunities and chal-lenges for the GISciences in an era of big data.