AutoGIS: an agent framework for automated geospatial data management and analysis

Geospatial analysis plays a critical role in urban governance, environmental monitoring, and disaster management, yet end-to-end automation remains constrained by fragmented data acquisition, complex operator coupling, and limited workflow reproducibility. We present AutoGIS, a contract-driven autonomous GIS agent framework that formulates geospatial analysis as a program synthesis problem governed by verifiable contracts and environmental feedback. AutoGIS comprises a data agent and a code agent. The data agent performs data-path-free discovery, acquisition, and processing through a Geospatial Asset Knowledge Graph (GAKG) and satisfaction gating, producing analysis-ready data and data contracts. The code agent conditions PyQGIS generation on these data contracts and algorithm contracts, and performs self-repair using stack traces and runtime logs. We further develop QGIS-GPT with a three-stage laddered alignment strategy to improve long-tail operator understanding and invocation. Experiments show that AutoGIS improves asset retrieval, task orchestration, algorithm understanding, code generation, and repair robustness across multi-source geospatial tasks. Case studies on buffer analysis, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) change analysis, and rule-based land-use classification demonstrate end-to-end intent-to-analysis capability, establishing a foundation for more reliable autonomous geospatial modeling.

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Publication Details

Journal
International Journal of Digital Earth
Published
2026-09-12
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2026.2704301
Primary Topic
Geographic Information Systems Studies
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

AutoGIS: an agent framework for automated geospatial data management and analysis

Jiaxiang Li, Zhou Chen, Zimeng Wang, Mingrun Zang et al.
International Journal of Digital Earth
Geographic Information Systems Studies
article

AutoGIS: an agent framework for automated geospatial data management and analysis

Jiaxiang Li, Zhou Chen, Zimeng Wang, Mingrun Zang, Yuanhong Liao, Juanzi Li, Xinan Zhang, Yuqi Bai
article en

Abstract

Geospatial analysis plays a critical role in urban governance, environmental monitoring, and disaster management, yet end-to-end automation remains constrained by fragmented data acquisition, complex operator coupling, and limited workflow reproducibility. We present AutoGIS, a contract-driven autonomous GIS agent framework that formulates geospatial analysis as a program synthesis problem governed by verifiable contracts and environmental feedback. AutoGIS comprises a data agent and a code agent. The data agent performs data-path-free discovery, acquisition, and processing through a Geospatial Asset Knowledge Graph (GAKG) and satisfaction gating, producing analysis-ready data and data contracts. The code agent conditions PyQGIS generation on these data contracts and algorithm contracts, and performs self-repair using stack traces and runtime logs. We further develop QGIS-GPT with a three-stage laddered alignment strategy to improve long-tail operator understanding and invocation. Experiments show that AutoGIS improves asset retrieval, task orchestration, algorithm understanding, code generation, and repair robustness across multi-source geospatial tasks. Case studies on buffer analysis, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) change analysis, and rule-based land-use classification demonstrate end-to-end intent-to-analysis capability, establishing a foundation for more reliable autonomous geospatial modeling.

International Journal of Digital EarthVol. 19(2)
Ministry of Education (ME), Tsinghua–Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (CN), Tsinghua University (CN)
National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Key Research and Development Program of China
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Geographic Information Systems Studies
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