33rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems

ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025

November 3 - 6, 2025, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Call for Short Papers

Important Dates:

  • Abstract Submission: Friday, May 23rd, 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 thirty-third edition of ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2025 (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025) 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 Researchers, students, and practitioners are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers not being considered for publication in any other forum.

Short Paper Contributions

This year there are two avenues for short paper contributions:
(1) A paper submitted to the research track of the ACM SIGSPATIAL conference may be accepted as a short paper (see the corresponding Call For Papers).
(2) A paper can be directly submitted as a Short Paper and will be reviewed by the separate Short Papers PC. This is a new mechanism this year.

Short papers have at most 4 pages (including references), prepared using the ACM two-column conference proceedings template, and will appear in the conference proceedings. They will be presented at the conference via posters and short lightning talks.

Just as for the research track of the ACM SIGSPATIAL conference, there are two types of short papers:

Short 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 sketch of prototype implementation and an initial evaluation that may include some aggregate results of the comparison with alternate approaches. Example: a novel algorithm for complex query processing or a novel model of spatial causal inference.

Short 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, and functionality. Performance of the system, and an evaluation that may include comparisons with alternate systems are requested in an aggregate form. Example: a platform for spatio-temporal data analysis in real-time.

Topics of interest

Suggested topics of interest are the same as the research track. They 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

  • Short papers: up to 4 pages including references

Accepted short papers will appear in the conference proceedings. Submissions that do not follow the page limit requirements will be desk-rejected without technical reviews. All page limits are based on the ACM two-column conference proceedings template.

Paper titles. Short papers titles do not have specific requirements.

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.

Accepted short papers. Accepted short papers will appear in the conference proceedings. Moreover, a poster must be prepared and presented at the conference as well as a short lightning presentation.

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 (select the “short papers” track): https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigspatial2025

Camera-ready information. Short 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 will 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 short paper 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 in the form of a poster and a short lightning talk presentation. Otherwise, the accepted submission will not appear in the conference proceedings.

Short Papers PC-Chairs Contact Information

Alberto Belussi, University of Verona, Verona, Italy - alberto.belussi@univr.it
Carola Wenk, Tulane University, USA - cwenk@tulane.edu
Lexie Yang, ORNL, USA - yangh@ornl.gov