Researchers and practitioners working with spatial data often develop fundamental new techniques they would like to share with their community. These are not necessarily new research results, not yet in any textbook, but they are interesting, self-contained techniques for doing something useful in the domain of spatial data. We call these techniques “spatial gems”.

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Example spatial gems are:

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• Converting latitude/longitude coordinates into a locally Euclidean coordinate system

• Computing the mean and variance of speed from two noisy location measurements

• Tessellating the earth in a convenient, useful way

• Interpolating latitude/longitude data with a Gaussian process model

• Simplifying a latitude/longitude polygon while preserving its perimeter and area

• Matching two trajectories with dynamic time warping

• A working R-Tree in Python

• Spatial point data generators including uniform, normal, and clustered

• Computing the angles of the sun in the sky for any date/time and lat/long

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The goal of this workshop is to publish several spatial gems contributed by the participants. While a gem may have already been published as a small part of a paper, extracting it into a gem makes it much more likely to be found and used by others. Good gems will stay relevant for a long time. Each gem will be two to eight pages long. Where appropriate, a good gem will include numerical examples so programmers can verify their implementations, but it should not be a research paper with results on multiple test cases. You can share code to support your gem if you feel it would be helpful. You can include short blocks of code in your paper, and you can share longer code in an open source repository of your choice, with a pointer in your paper. An example spatial gem is here. Please contact the organizers if you have an idea you would like to discuss.

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Workshop Format

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At the workshop, authors of accepted gems will work together to edit each other’s papers to improve clarity and readability. The workshop will be different from a mini-conference, because participants will work together on their papers. For collaborative editing, we require that all submissions be in the form of a shared Overleaf project in LaTeX.

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After a few instances of this workshop, our goal is to publish all the spatial gems in a book or other volume, with any proceeds contributed back to the workshop and/or conference. Because of this, we will not be publishing the papers in the ACM Digital Library, in order to preserve our ability to create a collection later. If your paper is accepted, it will be distributed on the USB drive at the conference, and we will host a copy of your paper on the workshop web site. You will be free to distribute your paper to anyone and host a copy anywhere, including your own web site and arXiv.

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Submission Deadline

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Submissions are due 9 September 2022 at midnight anywhere on earth (AOE, UTC -12), and accept/reject decisions will be sent by 20 September 2022.

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Make submissions through EasyChair at https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=spatialgems2022.

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Submission Format

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Please visit here for details on how to submit a spatial gem, including the Overleaf template to use.