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.
Authors
- Jiaxiang Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0478-1409)
- Zhou Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3271-2515)
- Zimeng Wang
- Mingrun Zang
- Yuanhong Liao
- Juanzi Li
- Xinan Zhang
- Yuqi Bai
Institutions
- Ministry of Education (ME)
- Tsinghua–Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (CN)
- Tsinghua University (CN)
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
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- National Key Research and Development Program of China