Meilin Shi

About Me

I am a senior data scientist working at the Geographic Data Service, University of Liverpool.

Research Interests

• Geographic Knowledge Graphs
• GeoAI
• Geospatial Semantics
• Spatial Data Science

Education

• Ph.D in Geography, University of Vienna, 2026
• M.A. in Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2021
• B.S. in Physical Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2018
  • Minor in German Studies

Teaching

• 290003 VU Introduction to Spatial Data Science (2024W)
  Course description: The course will introduce students to Spatial Data Science as a “fourth paradigm” of science, outlining all stages from the initial conceptualization and representation of data to their creation, entry, cleaning, and analysis (e.g., using clustering or classification). This course discusses classics such as DBSCAN, develops a first understanding of issues of computational complexity, and includes introductory materials (and application areas) in knowledge representation, data engineering, geographic information retrieval (GIR), and so on, thereby providing an introduction for future class work (e.g., in GIR).
• 290006 PS Open GIS and Open Data in Geoinformation (2024S, 2025S)
  Course description: The course provides participants with an in-depth exploration of Open Source software within the realm of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the principles of Open Data initiatives. Participants will gain practical skills and knowledge of Open Source GIS tools and leverage Open Data resources effectively. Throughout the course, participants will learn from the fundamental concepts of Open GIS and Open Data to master the complete workflow of geospatial data processing and publication.
• 290061 PS Principles and Methods of Application Development - Geographic Information Retrieval (2023W, 2024W)
  Course description: The course will cover GIR’s core concepts, techniques and challenges, such as the ambiguity of place names, topological relations, georeferencing, spatial indexing and ranking, and geospatial semantics. Through literature review and Python-based practical exercises, participants will also learn how to query structured data from geographic databases, how to geoparse unstructured texts to extract location references, and geospatial semantic analysis and interactive geo-visualization with retrieved information.

Publications

• The Geography of Evolving Concepts: Quantifying Spatial, Temporal, and Semantic Consequences of Ontology Changes
  Meilin Shi, Krzysztof Janowicz, Zilong Liu, Mina Karimi, Ivan Majic, Alexandra Fortacz. International Journal of Digital Earth, 2026. [PDF] [Code]

• What, When, and Where Do You Mean? Detecting Spatio-Temporal Concept Drift in Scientific Texts
  Meilin Shi, Krzysztof Janowicz, Zilong Liu, Mina Karimi, Ivan Majic, Alexandra Fortacz. GIScience 2025. [PDF] [Code]

• Defining Concept Drift and Its Variants in Research Data Management: A Scientometric Case Study on Geographic Information Science
  Meilin Shi, Krzysztof Janowicz, Zilong Liu, Mina Karimi, Ivan Majic, Alexandra Fortacz. Transaction in GIS, 2025. [PDF]

• Geography for AI sustainability and sustainability for GeoAI
  Meilin Shi, Krzysztof Janowicz, Judith Verstegen, Kitty Currier, Nina Wiedemann, Gengchen Mai, Ivan Majic, Zilong Liu, Rui Zhu. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 2025. [PDF] [Code]

• The KnowWhereGraph Ontology
  Cogan Shimizu, Shirly Stephen, Adrita Barua, Ling Cai, Antrea Christou, Kitty Currier, Abhilekha Dalal, Colby K Fisher, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, Wenwen Li, Zilong Liu, Mohammad Saeid Mahdavinejad, Gengchen Mai, Dean Rehberger, Mark Schildhauer, Meilin Shi, Sanaz Saki Norouzi, Yuanyuan Tian, Sizhe Wang, Zhangyu Wang, Joseph Zalewski, Lu Zhou, Rui Zhu. Journal of Web Semantics, 2024.

• Towards Formalizing Concept Drift and Its Variants: A Case Study Using Past COSIT Proceedings
  Meilin Shi, Krzysztof Janowicz, Zilong Liu, Kitty Currier. COSIT 2024. [PDF] [Code]

• Fast Forward from Data to Insight: (Geographic) Knowledge Graphs and Their Applications
  Krzysztof Janowicz, Kitty Currier, Cogan Shimizu, Rui Zhu, Meilin Shi, Colby K. Fisher, Dean Rehberger, Pascal Hitzler, Zilong Liu, and Shirly Stephen. Handbook of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence, 2023.

• Thinking Geographically about AI Sustainability
  Meilin Shi, Kitty Currier, Zilong Liu, Krzysztof Janowicz, Nina Wiedemann, Judith Verstegen, Grant McKenzie, Anita Graser, Rui Zhu, and Gengchen Mai. AGILE 2023. [PDF]

• Know, Know Where, KnowWhereGraph: A densely connected, cross‐domain knowledge graph and geo‐enrichment service stack for applications in environmental intelligence
  Krzysztof Janowicz, Pascal Hitzler, Wenwen Li, Dean Rehberger, Mark Schildhauer, Rui Zhu, Cogan Shimizu, Colby K Fisher, Ling Cai, Gengchen Mai, Joseph Zalewski, Lu Zhou, Shirly Stephen, Seila Gonzalez, Bryce Mecum, Anna Lopez‐Carr, Andrew Schroeder, David Smith, Dawn Wright, Sizhe Wang, Yuanyuan Tian, Zilong Liu, Meilin Shi, Anthony D’Onofrio, Zhining Gu, Kitty Currier. AI Magazine, 2022. [PDF]

• LD Connect: A Linked Data Portal for IOS Press Scientometrics * Spotlight Paper
  Zilong Liu*, Meilin Shi*, Krzysztof Janowicz, Blake Regalia, Stephanie Delbecque, Gengchen Mai, Rui Zhu, Pascal Hitzler. ESWC 2022. [PDF] [Code]

• Diverse Data! Diverse Schemata?
  Krzysztof Janowicz, Cogan Shimizu, Pascal Hitzler, Gengchen Mai, Shirly Stephen, Rui Zhu, Ling Cai, Lu Zhou, Mark Schildhauer, Zilong Liu, Zhangyu Wang, Meilin Shi. Semantic Web Journal, 2021. [PDF]

• A Socially Aware Huff Model for Destination Choice in Nature-based Tourism * Best Full Paper Nominatee
  Meilin Shi, Krzysztof Janowicz, Ling Cai, Gengchen Mai and Rui Zhu. AGILE 2021. [PDF] [Code]

• Semantically-Enriched Search Engine for Geoportals: A Case Study with ArcGIS Online
  Gengchen Mai, Krzysztof Janowicz, Sathya Prasad, Meilin Shi, Ling Cai, Rui Zhu, Blake Regalia, Ni Lao. AGILE 2020. [PDF]

• SE-KGE: A Location-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding Model for Geographic Question Answering and Spatial Semantic Lifting
  Gengchen Mai, Krzysztof Janowicz, Ling Cai, Rui Zhu, Blake Regalia, Bo Yan, Meilin Shi, Ni Lao. Transactions in GIS, 24.3 (2020). [PDF]

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