The GIScience conference series (www. giscience. org) was created as a forum for all researchers who are interested in advancing research in the fundam- tal aspects of geographic information science. Starting with GIScience 2000 in Savannah, Georgia, USA, the conferences have been held biennially, bringing together a highly interdisciplinary group of scientists from academia, industry, and governmentto analyze progressand to explore new researchdirections. The conferences focus on emerging topics and basic research ?ndings across all s- tors of geographic information science. After three...

20 years ago, from July 8 to 20, 1990, 60 researchers gathered for two weeks at Castillo-Palacio Magalia in Las Navas del Marques (Avila Province, Spain) to discuss cognitive and linguistic aspects of geographic space. This meeting was the start of successful research on cognitive issues in geographic information science, produced an edited book (D. M. Mark and A. U. Frank, Eds., 1991, Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space. NATO ASI Series D: Behavioural and Social Sciences 63. Kluwer, Dordrecht/Boston/London), and led to a biannual conference (COSIT), a refereed journal...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT 2015, held in Santa Fee, NM, USA, in October 2015.

The 22 papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 full paper submissions. The following topics are addressed: formalizing and modeling space-time, qualitative spatio-temporal reasoning and representation, language and space, signs, images, maps, and other representations of space, navigations by humans and machines.