GIScience in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: A Research Agenda Towards Autonomous GIS

Understand

The advent of generative AI exemplified by large language models (LLMs) opens new ways to represent and compute geographic information and transcends the process of geographic knowledge production, driving geographic information systems (GIS) towards autonomous GIS.

• Leveraging LLMs as the decision core, autonomous GIS can independently generate and execute geoprocessing workflows to perform spatial analysis.
• In this vision paper, we further elaborate on the concept of autonomous GIS and present a conceptual framework that defines its five autonomous goals, five autonomous levels, five core functions, and three operational scales.
• We demonstrate how autonomous GIS could perform geospatial data retrieval, spatial analysis, and map making with four proof-of-concept GIS agents.