The low hanging fruit is gone: achievements and challenges of computational movement analysis

This position paper reviews the achievements and open challenges of movement analysis within Geographical Information Science. The paper argues that the simple problems of movement analysis have mostly been addressed to a sufficient level ("the low hanging fruit"), leaving the research community with the much more challenging problems for the years ahead ("the high hanging fruit"). Whereas the community has made good progress in structuring trajectory data (segmentation, similarity, clustering) and conceptualizing and detecting movement patterns, the much harder task of semantic annotation of structures and patterns remains difficult. The position paper summarizes both achievements and challenges with two sets assertions and calls for the establishment of a unifying theory of Computational Movement Analysis.