Big Data and Generalized GIS

Objective The development of an ubiquitous computing infrastructure and data processing technologiesare giving birth to big data,and the continuous refining of the spatial-temporal granularities of big da-ta speeds up the generalization of geo-spatial information.In this paper,the distinctive characteristicsof generalized geo-spatial information are investigated,and the urgent need for a more generalized con-cept of GIS are clarified.Then the technical challenges for general GIS are set forward in terms of datacollection and cleaning,data management and integration,and data analysis and computing.The pro-gress is summarized and the research issues are discussed in geo-spatial data collection with Internettext mining,moving object database,dynamic and heterogeneous data management,moving trajectorydata mining,and complex network analysis.The fusion of geocomputation,urban computing and so-cial computing in the near future is considered at the end of the paper.