Geographic information science in the era of geospatial big data: A cyberspace perspective

The advent of information and communication technology and the Internet of Things have led our society toward a digital era.The proliferation of personal computers,smartphones,intelligent autonomous sensors,and pervasive network interactions with individuals have gradually shifted human activities from offline to online and from in person to virtual.This transformation has brought a series of challenges in a variety of fields,such as the dilemma of placelessness,some aspects of timelessness(no time relevance),and the changing relevance of distance in the field of geographic information science(GIScience).In the last two decades,“cyber thinking”in GIScience has received significant attention from different perspectives.For instance,human activities in“cyberspace”need to be reconsidered when coupled with the geographic space to observe the first law of geography.