Songnian Li

Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University)

Big data has now become a strong focus of global interest that is increasingly attracting the attention of academia, industry, government and other organizations. Big data can be situated in the disciplinary area of traditional geospatial data handling theory and methods. The increasing volume and varying format of collected geospatial big data pre...

Social media platforms, or social networks, have allowed millions of users to post online content about topics related to our daily lives. Traffic is one of the many topics for which users generate content. People tend to post traffic related messages through the ever-expanding geosocial media platforms. Monitoring and analyzing this rich and conti...

A mechanistic understanding of human activity patterns lays a foundation for many applications. The majority of the current research aims to outline human activity patterns mainly from spatiotemporal perspectives (i.e., modeling human mobility patterns) with a lack of understanding of the motivations behind the behavior. The aim of this study is to...

Social media platforms enable efficient traffic event detection by allowing users to produce geo-tagged content (e.g., tweets) known as geosocial media data. Geosocial media data improve road safety by providing timely updates for traffic flow and traffic control. Recent studies on traffic event detection with geosocial media data have been focused...

Many spatial decision support systems suffer from user adoption issues in practice due to lack of trust, technical expertise, and resources. Automated machine learning has recently allowed non-experts to explore and apply machine-learning models in the industry without requiring abundant expert knowledge and resources. This paper reviews recent lit...

Smartphone indoor positioning and navigation is a crucial technology for realizing indoor location services. The fusion of multi-source sensors in complex indoor scenarios benefits from the complementary advantages of various sensors and has become a research hotspot in the field of pervasive indoor localization applications for smartphones. In thi...

Murals, as important carriers of cultural heritage and historical records, showcase artistic, aesthetic, social, and political significance. In ancient times, religious activities such as burning incense and candles in temples led to many murals being polluted by soot, causing them to darken, lose details, and, in severe cases, completely blacken....

A smart campus integrates the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and real-time sensor data to optimize campus functions and create a context-aware decision-support platform for effective campus management. A crucial aspect of a smart campus is the water distribution system, which faces several challenges due to bursts, leaks, and water qu...

The explosive development of shared bicycles has changed the way people travel. In parallel with the urbanization process, shared bicycles have emerged as a significant mode of transportation, especially for the first and last mile transit. With the aim of obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the spatiotemporal patterns underlying shared bicy...

Buddhist niches in grottoes can be represented in three-dimensional (3D) for their detailed geometries on surfaces by using triangular meshes generated from point clouds. However, not all applications require 3D models with high geometric detail. The mesh models of niches have drawbacks such as large data volumes, lack of semantic information, and...

Evaluation of surface distress is an important aspect of pavement management. The most common practice to assess surface distress is to develop a pavement condition index (PCI), with ASTM-PCI being the most widely used in evaluating flexible pavements. Traditional PCI evaluation methods rely on labour-intensive, manual inspections, leading to signi...

Scene-oriented multi-source sensor fusion for smartphone pervasive indoor localization is the key to location-based services (LBS), which is of practical significance to addressing the limitations of indoor navigation satellite signals and facilitating accurate location services within the final hundred meters. The rapid advancement of smartphone s...

In recent years, the deep learning-based semantic segmentation for point clouds has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in processing 3D urban scenes for applications such as three-dimensional reconstruction, semantic modeling, and augmented reality. However, research on grottoes scenes is very limited. It is currently unclear how existing neural...

Murals are artworks painted on walls that represent various cultures, traditions, historical periods, spiritual narratives and civilisations. Unfortunately, before modern preventive measures were implemented, murals suffered considerable degradation from accumulating substances, such as incense oil and carbon, leading to a darkening or blackening p...

Over the last decade, event prediction has drawn attention from both academic and industry communities, resulting in a substantial volume of scientific papers published in a wide range of journals by scholars from different countries and disciplines. However, thus far, a comprehensive and systematic survey of recent literature has been lacking to q...

In the last decade, the event knowledge graph field has received significant attention from both academic and industry communities, leading to the proliferated publication of numerous scientific papers in diverse journals, countries, and disciplines. However, a comprehensive and systematic survey of the recent literature in this area to obtain how...

In recent decades, we have witnessed great advances on the Internet of Things, mobile devices, sensor-based systems, and resulting big data infrastructures, which have gradually, yet fundamentally influenced the way people interact with and in the digital and physical world. Many human activities now not only operate in geographical (physical) spac...

In the cultural heritage field, point clouds, as important raw data of geomatics, are not only three-dimensional (3D) spatial presentations of 3D objects but they also have the potential to gradually advance towards an intelligent data structure with scene understanding, autonomous cognition, and a decision-making ability. The approach of point clo...

Urban Functional Zone (UFZ) identification is vital for urban planning, renewal, and development. Point of Interest (POI), as one of the most popular data in UFZ studies, is transformed into a geo-corpus under specific sampling strategies, which can be used with Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to extract geo-semantic features and ident...

Environmental changes and human activities have caused serious degradation of murals around the world. Scratches are one of the most common issues in these damaged murals. We propose a new method for virtually enhancing and removing scratches from murals; which can provide an auxiliary reference and support for actual restoration. First, principal...

Geospatial big data and AI/deep learning provide a new means for researching the Earth's surface at a variety of scales. Different from conventional geospatial small data, geospatial big data is characterized by its higher resolution in both space and time and individual-based rather than aggregated and can therefore be studied in its entirety rath...

The purpose of this research is to develop an approach for a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) that integrates Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), and Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) to generate precision geo-interventions based on standardized geospatial data and user design constraints. The geo-interv...

Many spatial decision support systems suffer from user adoption issues in practice due to lack of trust, technical expertise, and resources. Automated machine learning has recently allowed non-experts to explore and apply machine learning models in the industry without requiring abundant expert knowledge and resources. This paper reviews recent lit...

The division of the territorial space functional area is the primary method to study the rational exploitation and use of land space. The research on the Production–Living–Ecological Space (PLES) change and its motivating factors has major implications for managing and optimizing spatial planning and may open up a new research direction for inquiri...

Urban Functional Zones (UFZs) can be identified by measuring the spatiotemporal patterns of activities that occur within them. Geosocial media data possesses abundant spatial and temporal information for activity mining. Identifying UFZs from geosocial media data aids urban planning, infrastructure, resource allocation, and transportation moderniza...

Road surface monitoring is a critical key factor to serve the purpose of road safety and driving comfort. Recently, many efforts have been made in developing approaches to detect road surface anomalies using smartphone sensors. However, detecting road surface anomalies from smartphone sensors face considerable number of challenges due to the variou...

Detecting urban human mobility patterns helps contributes to many urbanization issues, such as urban planning and traffic management. With the growing volume of crowd-sourced data, many studies have benefited from this data type to explore people’s daily movements and track their activities. There are several published review papers examing these s...

Urban Functional Zone (UFZ) identification facilitates the understanding of urban systems, which are complex and huge, and helps promote sustainable urban development. Existing studies on UFZ identification with Points of Interests (POIs) have focused much on more accurately extracting functional semantics, but ignored the fine delineation of UFZs...

The striking realism of the life-sized ceramic terracotta warriors has been attracting the interest of the public and archaeologists since they were discovered from the mausoleum complex of the first Chinese Emperor Qin Shihuang in the 1970s. It is still debated whether the life-size models were based on individual people or were just crafted from...

Rapid population growth has had a significant impact on society, economy and environment, which will challenge the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Spatially accurate and detailed population distribution data are essential for measuring the impact of population growth and tracking progress on the SDGs. However...

The digital documentation of cultural relics plays an important role in archiving, protection, and management. In the field of cultural heritage, three-dimensional (3D) point cloud data is effective at expressing complex geometric structures and geometric details on the surface of cultural relics, but lacks semantic information. To elaborate the ge...

Road surface hazards affect the driving safety and comfort of road users. Recently, smartphones and mobile devices equipped with motion sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscope sensors have attracted researchers’ attention for the development of low-cost approaches for road surface monitoring. However, processing smartphone sensors to monitor r...

Grottoes, with caves and statues, are an important part of immovable heritage. Statues in a particular grotto setting are often similar in geometric form and artistic style, and identifying the similarity between these statues can help provide important references for value recognition, condition assessment, repair, and the virtual restoration of s...

30-m Global Land Cover (GLC) data products permit the detection of land cover changes at the scale of most human land activities, and are therefore used as fundamental information for sustainable development, environmental change studies, and many other societal benefit areas. In the past few years, increasing efforts have been devoted to the accur...

The authors would like to make the following correction of [...]

The three main elements of autonomous vehicles (AV) are visibility, orientation, and decision. This chapter presents an overview of the implementation of visibility-based technologies and methodologies. The chapter first presents two fundamental aspects that are necessary for understanding the main contents. The first aspect is highway geometric de...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a significant atmospheric greenhouse gas and its concentrations can be observed by in situ surface stations, aircraft flights and satellite sensors. This paper investigated the ability of the CO2 satellite observations to monitor, analyze and predict the horizontal and vertical distribution of atmospheric CO2 concentration a...

The ancient roof decorative components of the official-style architectures from the Ming and Qing dynasties in China hold both physical and symbolic significance. These roof structures are the essential objects in three-dimensional (3D) modeling of ancient architectures for traditional Chinese cultural preservation. Although ancient architectures c...

Since the rapid growth of urban populations, the study of urban systems has gained considerable attention from researchers, decision makers, governments, and organizations. Urban systems are complex and dynamic such that they produce emergent patterns such as self-organization and nonlinearity. Agent-based modelling presents an approach to simulati...

Time-series remote sensing data are important in monitoring land surface dynamics. Due to technical limitations, satellite sensors have a trade-off between temporal, spatial and spectral resolutions when acquiring remote sensing images. In order to obtain remote sensing images with high spatial resolution and high temporal frequency, spatiotemporal...

The United Nations (UN) adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015. The agenda consists of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) for the 2015–2030 period. To pertain these SDGs, 169 targets have been set. To measure these 169 targets, 230 indicators have been developed. UN member states are required to produce reports on their pr...

Security issues such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks have attracted increasing global concern and attention. How to effectively detect security events has become worrisome to countries worldwide. Advances in mobile Internet technology have led to hundreds of millions of users using social media daily to post microblogs, text messages and...

Geospatial dashboards have attracted increasing attention from both user communities and academic researchers since the late 1990s. Dashboards can gather, visualize, analyze and advise on urban performance to support sustainable development of smart cities. We conducted a critical review of the research and development of geospatial dashboards, inc...

Social media networks allow users to post what they are involved in with location information in a real‐time manner. It is therefore possible to collect large amounts of information related to local events from existing social networks. Mining this abundant information can feed users and organizations with situational awareness to make responsive p...

Land use change (LUC) is a dynamic process that significantly affects the environment, and various approaches have been proposed to analyze and model LUC for sustainable land use management and decision making. Recurrent neural network (RNN) models are part of deep learning (DL) approaches, which have the capability to capture spatial and temporal...

Quantitative assessments and dynamic monitoring of indicators based on fine-scale population data are necessary to support the implementation of the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda and to comprehensively achieve its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, most population data are collected by administrative units, and it is difficult to r...

High spatial and temporal resolution remotely sensed data is of great significance for the extraction of land use/cover information and the quantitative inversion of biophysical parameters. However, due to the limitation of sensor performance and the influence of rain cloud weather, it is difficult to obtain remote sensing images with both high spa...

Social media platforms allow millions of people worldwide to instantly share their thoughts online. Many people use social media to share traffic related experiences and events with online posts. A large amount of traffic related data can be obtained from these online posts – especially geosocial media data, where posts are tagged with geolocation...

Road surface monitoring is a key task for providing safe road infrastructure for road users. As a result, road surface condition monitoring aims to detect road surface anomalies such as potholes, cracks and bumps which affect driving comfort and on-road safety. Recently, smartphone-based sensing has become popular with the increased availability of...

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been used increasingly in several land-use classification tasks, but there is a need to further investigate its potential. This study aims to evaluate the performance of CNN methods for land classification and to identify land-use (LU) change. Eight transferred CNN-based models were fully evaluated on remote...

Road surface monitoring is a key factor to providing smooth and safe road infrastructure to road users. The key to road surface condition monitoring is to detect road surface anomalies, such as potholes, cracks, and bumps, which affect driving comfort and on-road safety. Road surface anomaly detection is a widely studied problem. Recently, smartpho...

Mapping burn severity of forest fires can contribute significantly to understanding, quantifying and monitoring of forest fire severity and its impacts on ecosystems. In recent years, several remote sensing-based methods for mapping burn severity have been reported in the literature, of which the implementations are mainly dependent on several fiel...

Ubiquitous taxi trajectory data has made it possible to apply it to different types of travel analysis. Of interest is the need to allow someone to monitor travel momentum and associated congestion in any location in space in real time. However, despite an abundant literature in taxi data visualization and its applicability to travel analysis, no e...

Wetlands, as an important part of urban landscape, provide diverse ecological and social services to cities. It is therefore essential to monitor wetlands in urban areas for ecosystem conservation and sustainable development. Remote sensing techniques have been affirmed promising in wetland extent mapping. However, conventional methods of mapping w...

Urban expansion is a land-use change process that transforms non-urban land into urban land. This process results in the loss of natural vegetation and increase in impervious surfaces. Urban expansion also alters the hydrologic cycling, atmospheric circulation, and nutrient cycling processes and generates enormous environmental and social impacts....

Ancient paintings, as one of the most important forms of artistic expression of Chinese traditional culture, are the most valuable and non-renewable treasure of human civilization. However, unfortunate situations occur, causing stains on paintings. Stains disfigure their artistry and values, and it is desirable to remove them. Traditional removal m...

Ubiquitous taxi trajectory data has made it possible to apply it to different types of travel analysis. Of interest is the need to allow someone to monitor travel momentum and associated congestion in any location in space in real time. However, despite an abundant literature in taxi data visualization and its applicability to travel analysis, no e...

Web mapping and the use of geospatial information online have evolved rapidly over the past few decades. Almost everyone in the world uses mapping information, whether or not one realizes it. Almost every mobile phone now has location services and every event and object on the earth has a location. The use of this geospatial location data has expan...

Change detection with remotely sensed imagery is a critical step in land cover monitoring and updating. Although a variety of algorithms or models have been developed, none of them can be universal for all cases. The selection of appropriate algorithms and construction of processing workflows depend largely on the expertise of experts about the “al...

Although maps have been around for a very long time, web maps are yet very young in their origin. Despite their relatively short history, web maps have been developing very rapidly over the past few decades. The use, users and usability of web maps have rapidly expanded along with developments in web technologies and new ways of mapping. In the pro...

A number of national, regional and global land cover classification systems have been developed to meet specific user requirements for land cover mapping exercises, independent of scale, nomenclature and quality. However, this variety of land-cover classification systems limits the compatibility and comparability of land cover data. Furthermore, th...

Compared with other wall paintings, tomb murals are rarely and have been most seriously damaged by natural weathering, erosion of bacteria and vandalism. Traditional identification methods are time-consuming, laborious, and confined to the visible light range, which mainly relies on expert's experience, analogy and visual color. This calls for new...

The quantitative simulation of forest fire spreading plays an essential role in designing quick risk management and implementing effective suppression policies. As a preferable modelling approach, the cellular automaton (CA) has been used to simulate the complex mechanisms of fire spreading. However, in traditional CA models, comprehensive studies...

The need and critical importance of global land cover and change information has been well recognized. Although rich collection of such information has been made available, the lack of necessary information services to support its easy access, analysis and validation makes it difficult to find, evaluate, select and reuse them through well-designed...