Large Language Model Integration for Intelligent Geospatial Analytics

Authors

  • Leif Navarro Department of Computer Science, University of Nevada, Reno
  • Devansh Raman School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • Deepak L. Krishnan Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University
  • Nicolas R. Jennings Department of Geography and Geospatial Sciences, Kansas State University

Keywords:

large language models, geospatial analytics, spatial intelligence, artificial intelligence infrastructure, remote sensing, spatial computing, multimodal systems, urban analytics, geospatial governance, intelligent infrastructures

Abstract

The rapid growth of geospatial data infrastructures, remote sensing platforms, sensor networks, and artificial intelligence systems has transformed spatial analytics into a foundational capability for environmental governance, urban planning, infrastructure management, logistics optimization, and disaster resilience. Simultaneously, large language models have emerged as a new computational paradigm capable of integrating heterogeneous information sources, enabling contextual reasoning, and supporting natural language interaction with complex analytical systems. This paper examines the integration of large language models into intelligent geospatial analytics from a systems-oriented perspective, emphasizing architectural design, computational interoperability, governance challenges, operational scalability, and socio-technical implications. Rather than treating large language models solely as conversational interfaces, the study conceptualizes them as orchestration layers capable of coordinating geospatial databases, multimodal sensing systems, simulation environments, and domain-specific analytical workflows. The paper analyzes the evolution of geospatial intelligence infrastructures and evaluates how language-centric AI architectures can improve spatial interpretation, decision support, semantic interoperability, and human-centered analytics. Particular attention is devoted to trade-offs involving computational efficiency, model reliability, spatial reasoning limitations, privacy protection, infrastructure sustainability, and fairness in geographic representation. The discussion further explores deployment considerations across smart cities, climate adaptation systems, transportation logistics, precision agriculture, and emergency management operations. The paper argues that successful integration requires a shift from isolated machine learning pipelines toward hybrid cognitive infrastructures combining symbolic reasoning, geospatial computation, and distributed cloud-edge coordination. The study concludes that large language model integration represents not merely a technological enhancement but a structural transformation in how geospatial intelligence ecosystems are designed, governed, and operationalized across public and private sectors.

References

Ajayi, O. G., Salubi, A. A., Angbas, A. F., & Odigure, M. G. (2018). Generation of accurate digital elevation models from UAV acquired low percentage overlapping images. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 39(8), 3113–3134.

Batty, M. (2018). Artificial intelligence and smart cities. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 45(1), 3–6.

Bommasani, R., Hudson, D. A., Adeli, E., Altman, R., Arora, S., von Arx, S., ... Liang, P. (2021). On the opportunities and risks of foundation models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07258.

Brown, T., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P., ... Amodei, D. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33, 1877–1901.

Burrough, P. A., McDonnell, R. A., & Lloyd, C. D. (2015). Principles of geographical information systems. Oxford University Press.

Devlin, J., Chang, M. W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, 4171–4186.

Goodchild, M. F. (2007). Citizens as sensors: The world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69(4), 211–221.

Goodchild, M. F., & Li, L. (2021). Replication and reproducibility in geography. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(5), 1300–1310.

Guo, H., Wang, L., Liang, D., & Li, L. (2020). Big Earth data from space: A new engine for Earth science. Science Bulletin, 65(7), 505–513.

Janowicz, K., Gao, S., McKenzie, G., Hu, Y., & Bhaduri, B. (2020). GeoAI: Spatially explicit artificial intelligence techniques for geographic knowledge discovery and beyond. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 34(4), 625–636.

Jiang, B., & Yao, X. (2006). Location-based services and GIS in perspective. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 30(6), 712–725.

Kitchin, R. (2016). The ethics of smart cities and urban science. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 374(2083), 20160115.

Li, S., Dragicevic, S., Castro, F. A., Sester, M., Winter, S., Coltekin, A., ... Cheng, T. (2016). Geospatial big data handling theory and methods: A review and research challenges. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 115, 119–133.

Liang, X., Gong, P., & Zhang, Q. (2019). Urban growth prediction using machine learning and remote sensing. Remote Sensing, 11(15), 1798.

Liu, Y., Ott, M., Goyal, N., Du, J., Joshi, M., Chen, D., ... Stoyanov, V. (2019). RoBERTa: A robustly optimized BERT pretraining approach. arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.11692.

Miller, H. J., & Goodchild, M. F. (2015). Data-driven geography. GeoJournal, 80(4), 449–461.

Monmonier, M. (2018). How to lie with maps (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

OpenAI. (2023). GPT-4 technical report. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.08774.

Raji, I. D., Smart, A., White, R. N., Mitchell, M., Gebru, T., Hutchinson, B., ... Barnes, P. (2020). Closing the AI accountability gap. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 33–44.

Reichstein, M., Camps-Valls, G., Stevens, B., Jung, M., Denzler, J., Carvalhais, N., & Prabhat. (2019). Deep learning and process understanding for data-driven Earth system science. Nature, 566(7743), 195–204.

Shneiderman, B. (2020). Human-centered artificial intelligence: Reliable, safe and trustworthy. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 36(6), 495–504.

Thrun, S. (2010). Toward robotic cars. Communications of the ACM, 53(4), 99–106.

Townsend, A. M. (2013). Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. W. W. Norton & Company.

Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., ... Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30, 5998–6008.

Voosen, P. (2023). AI chatbots are coming to search engines. Science, 379(6637), 919–920.

Wang, S., & Yuan, M. (2021). Revisiting geospatial cyberinfrastructure for big data processing. Transactions in GIS, 25(1), 1–16.

Wooldridge, M. (2020). The road to conscious machines: The story of AI. Pelican Books.

Xiang, Z., Schwartz, Z., Gerdes, J., & Uysal, M. (2015). What can big data and text analytics tell us about hotel guest experience and satisfaction? International Journal of Hospitality Management, 44, 120–130.

Yang, C., Yu, M., Hu, F., Jiang, Y., & Li, Y. (2017). Utilizing cloud computing to address big geospatial data challenges. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 61, 120–128.

Zhao, Y., & Tang, W. (2018). Large-scale geospatial data analytics for urban informatics. Geo-spatial Information Science, 21(4), 377–387.

Downloads

Published

2025-06-15

How to Cite

Leif Navarro, Devansh Raman, Deepak L. Krishnan, & Nicolas R. Jennings. (2025). Large Language Model Integration for Intelligent Geospatial Analytics. Computational Intelligence Systems, 3(1). Retrieved from https://scivexus.org/index.php/CIS/article/view/300