NORA: Autonomous Research Agent for Spatial Data Science

A new paper has introduced NORA, which stands for Night Owl Research Agent. This is an autonomous multi-agent system designed specifically for GIScience and spatial data science. It oversees the entire research workflow using a skills-first approach, featuring 21 unique workflow skills and 9 expert sub-agents, along with custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Two standout skills are especially impressive: one handles spatial analysis, using decision frameworks for tasks like exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial regression, while the other focuses on downloading spatial data. You can find the paper on arXiv under the identifier 2605.02092.