SIGSPATIAL2025: 33rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems Minneapolis, MN, United States, November 3-6, 2025 |
| Conference website | https://sigspatial2025.sigspatial.org/ |
| Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigspatial2025 |
33rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025)
November 3 - 6, 2025, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Research Track: Call for Papers
Important Dates
- Abstract Submission: Friday, May 23th, 2025, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
- Paper Submission: Friday, May 30th, 2025, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
- Notification of Accept/Reject: Thursday, July 31st, 2025, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
- Camera-ready: Thursday, August 21st, 2025, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
Overview
The ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2025 (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025), the thirty-third edition, will be held in Minneapolis, MN, in November 2025. The conference began as a series of symposia and workshops starting in 1993 with the aim of bringing together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners in relation to novel systems based on geospatial data and knowledge, and fostering interdisciplinary discussions and research in all aspects of geospatial information systems. The conference provides a forum for original research contributions covering all conceptual, design, and implementation aspects of geospatial data ranging from applications, to data storage and query processing, to internet of spatial things and spatial AI. The conference is the premier annual event of the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (ACM SIGSPATIAL). Researchers, students, and practitioners are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers not being considered for publication in any other forum.
Research track contributions: three types of papers
There are three types of papers in the research track:
- Regular Research Papers
- Experiment, Benchmark & Experience Papers
- Vision Papers
1. Regular research papers
Papers about theory, models, and algorithms. These papers present original research on foundational concepts, such as novel models and algorithms for spatial computing. These papers are invited, where appropriate, to include a prototype implementation and evaluation that may include comparisons with alternate approaches. Example: a novel algorithm for complex query processing or a novel model of spatial causal inference.
Papers about systems. These papers describe the design, implementation, and empirical evaluation of a novel system, framework, or processing pipeline created to address a specific problem. It typically provides a detailed explanation of a real-world problem, the architecture, functionality, and performance of the system, and an evaluation that may include comparisons with alternate systems. Example: a platform for spatio-temporal data analysis in real-time.
2. Experiment, benchmark, and experience papers
Papers about experiments. These papers evaluate multiple existing solutions to a problem and, through extensive experimentation, offer novel insights through a comprehensive analysis of their strengths and weaknesses. Example: evaluating anomaly detection algorithms using various datasets.
Papers about benchmarks. These papers introduce new benchmarks for evaluating and comparing different techniques, systems, or algorithms. They provide a standardized reference point to guide experimental research and foster consistent evaluation practices. Example: benchmarking spatiotemporal causal analysis algorithms.
Papers about experiences. These papers provide insights, lessons learned, and real-world experiences from deploying existing systems. They focus on practical challenges and observations from real-world usage, which are crucial for understanding the limitations of existing solutions. All the co-authors of an experience paper can be from academia. Example: lessons learned from the deployment of a system for indoor tracking.
3. Vision papers
These papers present visionary propositions that anticipate future directions and highlight compelling research opportunities for the SIGSPATIAL community. Submissions will be evaluated based on their potential to expand the current research agenda by defining new topics and problems with transformative impact. Proposals offering incremental improvements to well-studied problems (or slight variations of known solutions) are not relevant and should not be submitted. Instead, submissions that describe novel, early-stage projects with significant impact potential are welcome.
Topics of interest
Suggested topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
Spatial AI
Generative AI for spatial reasoning and simulation
Spatial foundation models
Causal reasoning in space and time
Spatial machine learning and explainability
Privacy and ethics
Spatial reasoning in robotics
Big spatial data
Spatial and spatio-temporal analysis
Query processing and optimization
Spatial data mining, pattern analysis and knowledge discovery
Spatio-temporal data management
Spatial decision support
Spatial data quality and uncertainty
Geo-entity linkage, geo-enrichment
Distributed and parallel algorithms
Geospatial architectures and middleware
GPU and novel hardware solutions
Pervasive computing and internet of spatial things
Localization and tracking indoors/outdoors
Contact tracing
Location-based services
Spatio-temporal sensor networks
Traffic telematics
Mobile systems and vehicular ad hoc networks
Spatial data acquisition, integration, processing
Standardization and interoperability
Earth observation and satellite data processing
Computational geometry and computer graphics
Image and video understanding
Spatial, geo-social and trajectory Simulation
Spatio-temporal stream processing
Spatial search
Geographic information retrieval
Human computer interaction and visualization
Similarity searching
Spatial data structures and algorithms
Spatial modeling and reasoning
Spatio-textual searching
Spatial intelligence at work
Intelligent transportation and sustainable mobility
Autonomous vehicles
Spatial knowledge graphs
Epidemiology and health
Cyber and physical security
Smart cities and spaces
Geospatial computer vision applications
Location business intelligence
Personalized geospatial recommendation systems
Submission
General information
- Regular Research Papers: up to 10 pages excluding references
- Experiment, Benchmark & Experience Papers: up to 10 pages excluding references
- Vision Papers up to 4 pages excluding reference
As for Regular Research Papers and Experiment, Benchmark & Experience papers: papers are limited to 10 pages (excluding references), with up to 2 additional pages after the references to be used for appendices. Submissions of Vision Papers should follow the same formatting but are limited to 4 pages with no appendix (excluding references). Accepted vision papers will appear in the conference proceedings. Submissions that do not follow the page limit requirements will be desk-rejected without technical reviews.
Paper titles. Experiment, Benchmark & Experience and Vision Papers should contain their type as a suffix in the title. The suffixes are [Experiment] and [Vision], respectively. For example: 'Spatial Intelligence on Mars [Vision]'; ‘Evaluating spatial navigation systems on Mars [Experiment]’. If the paper is accepted, the suffix will not be part of the camera-ready copy.
Authors. SIGSPATIAL 2025 is a single-blind conference, therefore the names and affiliations of the authors should be listed in the submitted version. The author list is considered to be final after the submission deadline and no changes, including the author order, to the author list are allowed for accepted papers.
Posters. Based on the evaluations from the reviewers, the Program Committee may recommend that certain papers are accepted as 4-page (including references) poster papers for poster presentation. Both full and poster papers will appear in the conference proceedings. All those page numbers are based on the ACM two-column conference proceedings template.
Conflict, authorship and content
ACM Policy on Authorship. Authors should review and follow the ACM Policy on Authorship which includes guidelines on the use of generative AI software tools for manuscript writing. In particular, the authors are responsible for all the submitted manuscripts and they should disclose the use of AI software tools in the paper.
ACM Policy on Conflict of Interest. As part of the submission, you will be asked to mark your conflict-of-interest with the Program Committee members. Authors should review the Conflict of Interest Policy for ACM Publications to decide if there is a conflict of interest. In summary, the following is a non-comprehensive list of examples of COI:
- All PhD advisors/advisees regardless of the graduation date.
- All current co-workers or a co-worker in the past 24 months. A co-worker is a person working at the same institution as one of the authors whether or not they actively collaborate.1
- Any co-author of a research paper in the last 24 months regardless of whether the paper was peer-reviewed or not, e.g., white papers or arXiv papers also count.2
- A research collaborator in the past 24 months whether or not this collaboration resulted in a publication.
- Close friends or relatives.
When in doubt, please reach out to the Program Committee Chairs or mark the potential conflicts on the submission website and add a note on why you think they could be marked as such. The Program Committee Chairs will review them and decide how to use that information. PC Chairs reserve the right to desk-reject a paper without review if COIs are not marked appropriately.
1 Short-terms affiliations such as a summer internship does not result in an institutional COI with all co-workers. However, the mentor and other collaborators are still marked.
2 Community papers that have a large number of authors and do not stem from a specific research project do not constitute a COI, e.g. the reports titled "Towards Mobility Data Science" and "Diversity and Inclusion Activities in Database Conferences: A 2021 Report" do not by themselves result in a COI.
Note on EasyChair: EasyChair does not have a mechanism to mark that there are no COI on a paper. If you confirm that there are no conflicts, then you do not need to submit the COI form.
ACM Policy on inappropriate content. ACM Publications cannot be used to propagate political or religious views or denigrate individuals or groups of people. See https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/inappropriate-content-policy
Formatting and camera-ready information
Templates and submission. Manuscripts should be submitted in PDF format and formatted using the ACM camera-ready templates available at http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. SIGSPATIAL uses the Conference Proceedings Primary Article template with two-column format. Alterations to the template, especially to gain more space, will be grounds for desk-rejection without further technical review. All papers should be submitted through EasyChair using the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigspatial2025
Camera-ready information.. ll papers accepted for SIGSPATIAL 2025 will be published in the Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. After the successful acceptance of a paper, we send an email to the contact author(s) with detailed instructions on how to prepare and submit the camera-ready copy of the accepted paper.
Registration and Presentation. Each accepted must have a separate paid author registration (i.e., an author cannot pay a single registration for more than one paper), and one author must attend the conference in person to present the accepted submission. Otherwise, the accepted submission will not appear in the conference proceedings or the ACM Digital Library version of the conference proceedings.
PC-Chairs Contact Information
Yao-Yi Chiang, University of Minnesota, USA. E-mail: yaoyi@umn.edu
Maria Luisa Damiani, University of Milan, Italy. E-mail: maria.damiani@unimi.it
Moustafa Youssef, The American University in Cairo, Egypt. E-mail:moustafa.youssef@gmail.com