Preface

Abstract. In the midst of the current pandemic that challenges our world, scientific research should not keep back, but instead persist, inform, inspire and resolve. In particular, for Geographic Information Science, we cannot help but highlight the relevance of spatial analysis methods and related technologies dating back to Dr. John Snow’s work on identifying the source of cholera outbreak in the district of Soho in London in 1854. Across the centuries, common problems and new perspectives blend to model our changing planet, temporal trends, human behavior and data abundance.

The theme of this special collection of research papers rests within the field of Geographic Information Science and Technology. These papers were submitted and accepted as full papers at Agile2020, the 23rd annual international conference of the Association for Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe, originally scheduled to take place in Chania, Greece, on the 16th – 19th June of 2020. However, the known COVID - 19 related conditions led the AGILE Council and the Scientific and Organizing committees, to cancel the Conference, placing above all the safety of the participants. This is the first year that the AGILE Conference proceedings will be published as Open Access online. This coincidence can only partly make up for the loss of personal interaction that the AGILE community enjoys at their annual meetings.

AGILE seeks to ensure that new perspectives on research and education in Geographic Information Science are addressed to help shaping the future European research agenda in this field. Hence, these research papers cover a broad range of topics on smart cities, social sensing, commuting, activity patterns, wayfinding and natural language modeling, self-driving cars and tourist recommendation systems, natural disaster and crime patterns, spatiotemporal data processing including interpolation and convolutional neural networks implementations.

For the first time in these Conference series, submissions were strongly encouraged to adhere to the AGILE Reproducible Paper Guidelines. In addition to the peer review, a reproducibility review by an independent expert committee took place as part of the Reproducible AGILE initiative (https://reproducible-agile.github.io/). If significant parts of a computational workflow could be reproduced, the paper was awarded the "AGILE Reproducible" badge. The badge links to a report which documents the completed steps and results of a specific reproduction.

We would like to express our appreciation and gratitude to the whole AGILE community, authors and reviewers that contributed to the AGILE 2020 Conference, the Local Organizing and Reproducibility Committees and the AGILE Council that was always eager to support all the necessary steps to mitigate these challenging circumstances.