Guest editorial: mobile computing support for geospatial systems

The integration of wireless communications into mobile devices has opened the door for a revolution of geospatial systems. Specifically, contemporary mobile devices come equipped with a large array of sensors, are connected everywhere, and are carried around by their users almost 24/7. Taken together, these developments enable a number of new paradigms such as crowd-sensing, anywhere (or ubiquitous) context-awareness, and large scale machine-tomachine interaction. These paradigms in turn pose novel challenges and opportunities for geospatial systems. This special issue includes four papers covering both theoretical, experimental and visionary research in the area of mobile computing support for geospatial systems. Searching for spatially located resources is a common yet frustrating everyday chore for many people. Consider, e.g., finding a parking place in a crowded city, a taxi driver looking for the next passenger, or an electric car owner trying to find a charging station. What further makes the task in these examples challenging is that the availability of the resources varies dynamically and obtaining accurate information about them is not feasible, e.g., due to deployment cost of sensors, parallel searchers by multiple users, and the rate at which changes in availability occur. The authors of BProbabilistic Spatio-Temporal Resource Search^ (DOI 10.1007/S10707-016-0275-9) address the provisioning of decision support Geoinformatica (2018) 22:71–73 DOI 10.1007/s10707-017-0292-3