Message from Editor-in-Chief for Vol.17, No.3 June 2021 Issue

From Editor-in-Chief

Issue number 3 of Volume 17 is bringing a blend of research in technology development and applications related to disasters- cyclones, floods, fires, rainfall variability and archaeology / modeling populations etc. I hope it will be useful for the vast segment of readers and researchers.

The world is reeling under Covid 19 even after one and half year second or third wave. India has vastly suffered and many activities either adapted online work culture or hybrid mode to face the situation. I hope all the readers of IJG would have taken good precaution and could kept themselves away from Covid infection. International journal of Geoinformatics has also gone for the organic changes and adapted 100% online mode. This was done as postal services were hugely disturbed and in some countries it was non-existent. Now, the online version is published 6 times a year rather than 4 times in earlier hardcopy version. This has given advantages to author to see their accepted paper being published much earlier than before. Another very exciting news that will make you happy is that within one year the ranking i.e. Impact Factor of the journal has gone up from 0.28 to 049 in Scopus. This is a great encouragement to all of us and we will try to achieve greater than 1 Impact Factor in next ranking cycle.  At this occasion, it is also a pleasure to inform now the journal has opened opportunities for our authors to make their papers as Open Access on a nominal cost. They will be having DOI for their papers and anyone can download their papers from any corners of the world.

I would like to encourage researchers to focus on data science, machine learning, deep learning and also on artificial intelligence. These tools are going to extract deep knowledge hidden inside the data. I am sure this will bring out the amazing potential of geoinformatics for serving mankind with crucial knowledge by modeling and predicting future scenarios. This will help sustainable development and also ensure coping capacity against disasters-natural and anthropogenic, It will also give us information on habitat of disease agents and support public health departments to control the outbreaks by providing real time geospatial data analytics. The next issue of the IJG is a Special Issue on selected papers from the 7^th International conference on HelathGIS held online in February 2021.

That’s all for this time. I pray for energy to all the readers of International Journal of Geoinformatics to take up challenges under this new normal and achieve good success and keep themselves safe.