GI_Forum 2017 – geospatial@online
Should you require more detailed information about this specific year (i.e. program), please contact office@gi-forum.org.
A retrospect
GI_Forum 2017, the 11th annual conference along with its sister conference, AGIT, was held at the University of Salzburg, Austria. It was organized by the University of Salzburg, under the coordination of the Department of Geoinformatics – Z_GIS and in cooperation with the GIScience Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
More than 1000 participants from over 40 countries benefited from a variety of topics covered across 85 sessions, 3 workshops and 4 special fora linking into the conference slogan “geospatial@online”. Thus, GI_Forum continues to be a rich blend of different people with different experiences, which made it a highly productive and inspiring conference.
The keynotes, invited speeches and panel discussions focused on interrelated themes of big data, data science, IoT, spatial aspect(s) of pervasive computing and machine learning as well as Geomedia in education. Keynote speakers were also available at the Young Researchers’ Corner for BSc, 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 60 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.
Special Sessions 2017
Earth Observation for Humanitarian Assistance (EO4Hum+), Integrated Assessment of Risk and Vulnerability, Urban Geoinformatics: Citizen Engagement and VGI Analytics for Smart Cities, and Spatial Perspectives on Active Mobility repeated their success from previous years and together with the session on Spatial Simulation lead to lively discussions in respective topics.
Keynote Speakers 2017
Keynotes included Alois Ferscha from the Institute for Pervasive Computing, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, James Steiner from Oracle Server Technologies, Oracle, United States, Ed Parsons from Google, United Kingdom and Sanna Mäki from Department of Geography and Geology, University of Turku, Finland. Find the presentations that have been made available to us here.
2017 Awards
This year’s Best Student Paper Award presented at the conference was awarded to Anna Butzhammer from iSpace, Salzburg with the title “Modelling intermodal accessibility considering quality aspects of transport – a GIS-based approach for the State of Salzburg”. Martin Wenk, Micha Heiser, Christian Scheidl, Sven Fuchs and Thomas Thaler from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna received the best poster award. The UNIGIS International Association Master’s Thesis Award was presented to Irene Fellner from Vienna University of Economics and Business for her thesis “Automatic generation of landmark-based indoor routing instructions” and to Nate Novak from Orca Maritime, Inc. for his thesis “Predictive Habitat Distribution Modeling of Sperm Whale (Physeter macrocephalus) within the Central Gulf of Alaska utilizing Passive Acoustic Monitoring”. Both presented their work at the conference. Mario Dolancic was awarded AGEO’s first prize for his contribution entitled ” Extracting lane-level road geometries from Floating Car Data”. This year’s ESRI grants went to Ciro Figueiredo and Guillaume Rohat.
GI_Forum Journal
GI_Forum publishes high quality original research across the transdisciplinary field of Geographic Information Science (GIScience). The journal provides a platform for dialogue among GI-Scientists and educators, technologists and critical thinkers in an ongoing effort to advance the field and ultimately contribute to the creation of an informed GISociety. Submissions concentrate on innovation in education, science, methodology and technologies in the spatial domain and their role towards a more just, ethical and sustainable science and society. GI_Forum implements the policy of open access publication after a double-blind peer review process through a highly international team of seasoned scientists for quality assurance. Special emphasis is put on actively supporting young scientists through formative reviews of their submissions. Only English language contributions are published.
