A Review of Recent Researches and Reflections on Geospatial Artificial Intelligence

The technological progress in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought new opportunities and challenges to the intelligent development and innovative research in geospatial related fields. Geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) refers to the interdisciplinary research direction that combines geography, earth science and artificial intelligence, and seeks to solve major scientific and engineering problems in human-environmental interaction systems through the research and development of spatial intelligence in machines to improve the dynamic perception, intelligent reasoning and knowledge discovery of geographic phenomena and earth science processes. This paper briefly summarizes the historical origins of GeoAI development, introduces spatially explicit and implicit AI models, reviews recent GeoAI research and applications(including spatial representation learning, spatiotemporal prediction and spatial interpolation, monitoring of geographic resources and environment, cartography, and geo-text data semantic analysis), and identifies several potential research challenges and directions for the future development of GeoAI.