GeoTool-GPT: a trainable method for facilitating Large Language Models to master GIS tools

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language-relevant tasks like text generation and question answering Q&A. To further expand their application, efforts focus on enabling LLMs to utilize real-world tools. However, their tool-use ability in professional GIS remains under explored due to two main challenges. Firstly, LLMs are usually trained on general-domain corpora, lacking sufficient and comprehensive GIS-specific data to align with professional knowledge, including understanding the functions of GIS tools. Secondly, researchers often need to combine multiple GIS tools to solve geospatial tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a trainable method to enable LLMs to master GIS tools. We curated a comprehensive set of resources: instruction-response data (GeoTool, 1950 instructions) to enhance the understanding of LLMs for GIS tools, instruction-solution data (GeoSolution, 3645 instructions) to improve their ability to generate tool-use solutions for geospatial tasks, and annotated instruction-solution evaluation data (GeoTask, 300 instructions) for evaluating LLMs' GIS tool-use proficiency. Using the collected training data (GeoTool and GeoSolution), we fine-tuned a professional-domain LLM called GeoTool-GPT based on an open-source general-domain LLM, the LLaMA-2-7b model. The experiment based on evaluation data validates our method's effectiveness in enhancing the tool-use ability of general-domain LLMs in the professional GIS domain, with the performance of our model closely approaching that of GPT-4.