Urban vitality, a multifaceted construct, is influenced by economic conditions and urban structural characteristics, and can significantly be impacted by public health emergencies. While extensive research has been conducted on urban vitality, prevailing studies often rely on singular data sources, limiting the scope for holistic assessment. Moreover, there is a conspicuous absence of longitudinal analyses on urban vitality’s evolution and a dearth of quantitative causal evaluations of the effects of public health emergencies. Addressing these gaps, this study devises a comprehensive framework for evaluating urban vitality, assessing Wuhan’s vitality from 2018 to 2020 across economic, social, spatial, and ecological dimensions. Utilizing a Difference-In-Difference (DID) model, the impact of public health emergencies is quantified. The findings indicate pronounced spatial variations in Wuhan’s urban vitality, with a gradational decline from the city center; public health emergencies exhibit differential impacts across vitality dimensions, detrimentally affecting economic, social, and spatial aspects, while bolstering ecological vitality. Moreover, high population and high public budget revenue are identified as factors enhancing urban vitality and bolstering the city’s resilience against sudden adversities. This study offers valuable insights for geographers and urban planners, contributing to the refinement of urban development strategies.

Geographic information collection platforms are widely used for acquiring geographic information. However, existing geographic information collection platforms have limited adaptability and configurability, negatively affecting their usability. They do not support complete field collection workflows or capture data with complex nested structures. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a generic geographic information collection platform based on a comprehensive XML schema definition and a corresponding XML toolkit. This platform includes professional and non-professional versions of collection software, as well as a management system. Users can configure controls and define nested tables within this platform to collect heterogeneous and complex nested data. Moreover, the platform supports functions such as task assignment, local deployment servers, multitasking parallelism, and summary statistics of heterogeneous data, ensuring complete workflow support for field data collection. The platform has been applied in agriculture, forestry, and related fields. This paper uses the agricultural industry structure survey as a case study. Practical applications and our case study show that this platform can reduce software development costs, lower user knowledge prerequisites, and fulfill 95% of geographic information collection scenarios.