Recent technological advances have led to an abundance of sensor, image, and streaming information. The ubiquitous availability of mobile processing devices, wireless sensor networks, and RFID tags in tandem with novel distributed computing architectures will enable a new range of applications. Most of the information generated by these distributed systems and applications is spatially referenced. Managing, processing, and using this geospatial information presents significant new research challenges in distributed information systems, including:

• efficient distributed, ad-hoc, and in-network geospatial information processing;
• algorithms and data structures that integrate a mobile user’s context, such as identity, location, activity, and intentions using sensed information;
• models of dynamic, real-time, and spatiotemporal data; and
• uncertainty and redundancy in geospatial sensor, image, and streaming data.

Further, emerging technologies have important implications across many application domains, including:

• transportation, tracking, navigation;
• active environments reacting to a mobile user’s context;
• sustainable management of natural environments; and
• emergency preparedness and response.