SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 22 August 2023!

The Scalable GIS Challenge for Researchers of the Urban Environment

We invite individuals or teams to submit the workflows of their own scalable GIS research in the urban environment, together with a narrative self-assessment of the level of scalability and challenges involved.

1. Introduction

Conducting research with large geospatial datasets and large-scale analyses that can be challenging. On the other hand, the increasing availability of big geodata and high performance computing infrastructure presents a great opportunity for scaling up urbanism research, either to more detailed and diverse datasets, or to large-scale analyses on national, continental or even global scale. Recognising this opportunity, the Scalable GIS Challenge for Researchers of the Urban Environment is meant both as a learning experience and as an encouragement for urbanism researchers to make their ongoing GIS work scalable.

The Challenge is organised by TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Department of Urbanism, in collaboration with the TU Delft Library, and it is part of the Netherlands eScience Center fellowship project Rbanism, targeting digital competence in the urbanism research community.

Join the Challenge to learn more about scalability in GIS research while working on your own project!

2. Call for entries

We invite researchers of the built environment to submit an entry including the following elements:

1. A research question involving GIS analysis.

2. A scalability problem (e.g., scaling up the analysis of a city to that of multiple cities). A scalability problem involves large datasets and/or large-scale analyses that can hardly be run on a local computer and in a graphical user interface, and thus can be overcome through automation, parallel computing and/or large-scale data storage and access solutions.

3. A workflow diagram in which the scalability challenge is addressed. A workflow diagram is a visual depiction of how elements of infrastructure (e.g., high performance computing, cloud computing), technologies (e.g., geospatially enabled databases, computational notebooks), data (e.g., local/remote, vector/raster, open/closed) of a specified size, extent and level of detail, outputs, and interfaces relate to each other.

4. A narrative self-assessment of the decisions taken regarding the large-scale datasets and analyses presented in the workflow diagram. It is not the sheer size of the data or analysis that is valued in this challenge, but the appropriateness of choices made to answer a given research question within a given geographic area and the carefully weighed implications of using specific data and/or analyses.

For an entry to be considered by the reviewers, it needs to contain all these four elements.

3. Eligibility

The challenge is open internationally to anyone conducting research in an urbanism-related field, such as (but not strictly limited to) urban design, spatial planning, urban studies, landscape architecture, architecture.

4. Prizes

Submissions will be ranked based on appropriateness of the chosen scaling strategy and self-assessement. The top three will be awarded with the following prizes. As we want to support further development in reproducibility practices, we allocate more mentoring hours for the 2nd and 3rd prize winners.

• 1st Prize: €400 + 2 mentoring hours
• 2nd Prize: €300 + 4 mentoring hours
• 3rd Prize: €100 + 6 mentoring hours

5. Timeline

• Announcement of the challenge: Monday, 22 May 2023
• Challenge closes: Thursday, 22 June August 2023
• Closing event and winners announced: Thursday, 29 June 2023 new data tba (Registration information will follow later)

6. Rules

• Submissions can be done individually or in teams. All members of the submission team have to be authors of the submitted material.
• Both published and unpublished research projects are eligible. We especially encourage submissions of unpublished work (e.g., PhD chapters or conference papers that are work in progress) because the challenge is intended as a process of learning and feedback leading to improvements in the submitted work.

7. Resources

If you want to learn more about reproducibility while preparing your submission, check out the Rbanism resources page.

8. Assessment

Submitted entries will be evaluated in depth by an expert assessment committee consisting of at least two members.

9. How to submit

1. Sign up for a free GitHub account, if you do not have one already.

2. Submit your entry by filling in the challenge issue template. Start an issue with the submission template.

Please note that your issue will always be publicly visible as part of this repository.

10. Stay informed

If you are considering to make a submission and want to stay informed about new relevant resources posted on the website or updates about the challenge, please let us know by sending an email to Claudiu Forgaci - [email protected]. Questions about the challenge can be addressed to the same email.