The Centre for Spatial Information Science (CSIS) is a leading center in Japan to promote the field of spatial information science. CSIS was established in 1998 as a centre serving for the University of Tokyo, and was later expanded to cater to all the universities in Japan in 2006.

To promote academic activities in this area, the centre set three aims: (1) Establish the centre firmly on the academic front and extending support to related sciences; (2) Establish the necessary infrastructure to support researchers and (3) Promote collaborative research among universities, governments and private enterprises.
To realise the first aim, the centre has undertaken several research projects. The centre started several service projects such as clearinghouse (site for searching for spatial data), GIS school, a portal providing information about geographical information science, virtual school for GIS users, free address matching service and providing several spatial data for research. To realise the third objective, the centre has taken up several joint research projects incorporating a variety of spatial and non-spatial data like census data, digital maps and other survey data. CSIS has currently 14 professors (including associate and assistant professors) and three post-doctoral researchers.

CSIS is unique in the sense that its members are drawn from a variety of fields - civil engineering, urban engineering, electric engineering, information science, geography, economics and statistics, and hence has good potential for initiating interdisciplinary research programmes.

Since CSIS is a research centre, it does not directly educate students per se. But the centre’s faculty perform as joint professors in several schools of the University of Tokyo. For instance, nine professors offer courses in the School of Frontier Sciences, where the centre welcomes about 10 graduate students under its supervision every year. The courses offered include Spatial Information Systems, Statistical Data Analysis, Urban and Regional Economic Analysis, Development and Utilisation of Spatial Database, Spatial Information Analysis, Residential Environment, Environment Information Science and others.

Research activities at the CSIS are quite diverse. On an average, it gains about three to four patents per year and gets about 100 papers published in academic journals, both national and international, every year. Here’s a brief about the major research projects taken up by the centre in the recent years.