Geographic Information Systems Studies Open access Peer reviewed

Introduction to the Special Issue on GeoAI Foundation Models and Their Applications, Part I

Song Gao, Dalton Lunga, Lexie Yang, Shawn Newsam and 1 more

ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems | May 29, 2026

Abstract

Abstract

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and multimodal sensing are driving a paradigm shift in the geospatial sciences, moving from task specific GeoAI models toward general purpose Geospatial Foundation Models (GeoFMs). While these models offer unprecedented opportunities for Earth monitoring, geographic knowledge discovery and addressing societal challenges such as natural disaster management, challenges remain regarding multimodal alignment, spatial reasoning, spatial distribution shifts, and generalizability. This article introduces the first section of a special issue dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art in GeoFMs and their applications, featuring diverse research on neurosymbolic AI, heterogeneous graph learning, self-supervised learning, spatial retrieval-augmented generation, a genealogical review, and additive compositionality in urban representation learning. Together, these contributions offer new insights toward the next generation of geospatial intelligence.

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Authors

Researchers on this paper

Song Gao

first | University of Wisconsin–Madison | ORCID 0000-0003-4359-6302

Dalton Lunga

middle | Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Lexie Yang

middle | Oak Ridge National Laboratory | ORCID 0000-0003-2252-6778

Shawn Newsam

middle | University of California, Merced | ORCID 0000-0001-6803-5291

Bruno Martins

last | University of Lisbon

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Citation

BibTeX

@article{Gao2026Introduction,
  title = {Introduction to the Special Issue on GeoAI Foundation Models and Their Applications, Part I},
  author = {Song Gao and Dalton Lunga and Lexie Yang and Shawn Newsam and Bruno Martins},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1145/3810438},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3810438}
}

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