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The concept of “place” is about to become one of the major research themes in the discipline of geographical information science (GIScience), as well as in adjoining fields. Briefly put, while locations provide objective references (eg, point coordinates), places are the units utilized by humans to approach the geographic world (Goodchild, 2015). On the one hand, the current “platial turn” in GIScience is caused by the plethora of oftentimes user-generated and particularly urban geographic datasets, which have become available in the last years (eg, geosocial media feeds). These so-called ambient geospatial datasets (Stefanidis et al., 2013) mirror digitally small and limited glimpses of the everyday lives of people, and how they approach and experience the geographic world. Ambient geographic datasets may thus be understood as something deeper than just mere “attributes referenced over point locations”, which is why they have recently been conjectured to be of platial rather than of spatial nature (Quesnot and Roche, 2015).“Platial” can hereby be understood as the place-based counterpart to the space-based adjective “spatial”.

Understanding these either individual or collective, digitally collected experiences requires taking account of social, cultural, behavioural, and cognitive aspects. This endeavour therefore opens up a delicate opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration, transcending disciplinary boundaries. Alongside this, researchers have become recently aware of the limitations of a purely spatial notion of GIS. Despite its undoubted success over the last decades, what spatial GIS effectively does when investigating human data is …