GI_Forum 2016 – open:spatial:Interfaces

A retrospect

GI_Forum 2016, the 10th annual conference along with its sister conference, AGIT and the German branch of FOSSGIS, was held at the University of Salzburg, Austria. It was organized by the Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics – Z_GIS of the University of Salzburg, and GIScience Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. 1200 participants from 36 countries benefited from a variety of topics covered across 56 technical sessions, 20 workshops and 13 special fora linking into the conference slogan “open:spatial:interfaces”. To name just a few, Integrated Assessment of Risk and Vulnerability was discussed for a full day, as have been Spatial Perspectives on Transportation Systems, GI-Curriculum Design 2.0 and Education. This event continues to be a rich blend of different people with different experiences, which makes it a highly productive and inspiring conference.

The keynotes, invited speeches and panel discussions focused on interrelated themes of big data, open data, open source software and their standards, and data science, education for spatial thinking and spatial citizenship. Keynotes included Harvey Miller (Ohio State University, USA), Katharyne Mitchell (University of Washington, USA) and Anita Graser (Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria). Keynote speakers were also available at the Young Researchers’ Corner for Bachelor, MSc and PhD students for more intimate discussions related to research practice and projects, career planning and opportunities for academic exchange in line with the conference policy of providing special care for young researchers.

The AGIT EXPO offered a platform to more than 50 exhibiting companies to demonstrate the latest development trends in GI technologies and services. The stalls and events at and around the EXPO were intensively visited by the conference participants.

2016 Awards

This year’s best student paper presented at the conference was awarded to Mario Dolancic from the University of Salzburg for his paper “Automatic Lane Level Road Network Graph Generation from Floating Car Data”. Erik Jakobi und Inga Gryl from University of Duisburg-Essen received the best poster award. Vincent van Altena won the UNIGIS International Award for his Master’s Thesis entitled “Improvement of automatic generalisation of manmade water networks for topographic maps by context-dependent pruning”, which he presented at the conference. Laura Knoth was awarded AGEO’s first prize for her contribution entitled “Spatial Information Infrastructures for Indoor Environments”. This year’s ESRI grants went to Lucile Etienne, Amirmasoud Forati & Christina Reithmeier.

GI_Forum Journal