Background
Recent years have seen a rapid increase in both the volume of papers addressing some aspect of movement, and the collection of data recording movement in a wide variety of domains. Thus, for example, individuals leave diverse traces of their spatial-temporal behaviour through use of mobile devices, social media, CCTV and even use of loyalty cards. Parcels are tracked 24/7 on their journeys across the world both individually and as objects contained within a complex transportation network. Natural phenomena such as hurricanes are named, delineated and tracked through space and time, whilst diseases and pollutants are typically observed through the study of some proxy or vector. In behavioural ecology the ability to track animals of all sizes, and more recently interactions between individuals, has led to new, previously unheard of possibilities for analysis. Despite this wide range of potential application domains, many papers rooted in the algorithm and GIScience literature deal with either small or simulated datasets, and there is a lack of discussion and evaluation of the consequences and challenges of implementing algorithms to answer questions posed by domain specialists on real datasets.
Aims and scope
The workshop and associated special issue have the central aim of addressing the problem set out above. Thus, we wish to bring together a set of researchers, and generate a set of publications, which demonstrate movement analysis methods grounded in real problems, which are demonstrably anchored in the literature, and which are implemented, evaluated and discussed with respect to real world datasets. The workshop and special issue are primarily focussed on physical movement of one or more identifiable objects within geographic space. All approaches to movement analysis, that is to including areas such as visual analytics, through data mining, querying massive datasets in moving object databases to GIScience and algorithmic contributions, are of interest. Other approaches to the analysis of movement data not listed here are also welcome. However, workshop attendees and paper submissions which describe only a methodological contribution, with no grounded discussion of importance of the question posed and the significance of the results within a domain are explicitly discouraged. Thus we encourage multidisciplinary teams of authors to submit papers with, for example, both ecological and algorithmic expertise.
