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For those of you in or around Münster in Germany: We will have a special guest at our GI Forum talk series tomorrow, Sara Fabrikant from the University of Zürich. Her talk is entitled Looking through static and dynamic geovisualization displays and will be held at the Institute for Geoinformatics, Robert-Koch-Str. 26-28, 48149 Münster in room 72 and start at 4:15pm (tuesday, december 5).

Abstract:

In this lecture I present an empirical evaluation framework based on the eye movement data collection method to investigate the relationship of thematic relevance and perceptual salience in static e.g., visual variables: color hue, color value and orientation) and animated (e.g., dynamic variables including transitions) map displays. In controlled experiments we currently investigate how novices’ viewing patterns are modified when thematically relevant items are made perceptually more salient through design. In essence, we are asking if perceptually salient elements draw novice viewers’ attention to thematically relevant information, whether or not users have domain knowledge.

Results collected thus far suggest that display design (i.e., saliency) does influence viewing behavior and inference making, whether participants have prior knowledge or not (i.e., training). With the collected empirical evidence we hope to provide better understanding of how people extract relevant information from static and dynamic maps, and how people make inferences from these map displays for knowledge
construction of dynamic geographic processes.

September 10-12, 2007 in Münster, Germany
http://www.gi-days.de

Topics and target group

The GI-Days 2007 will provide a platform for young researchers worldwide to present their work from all sectors of geographic information science. The range of topics will be comparable to the well established series of GIScience conferences, focussing on emerging topics and basic research findings.

GI-Days 2007 will bring together young researchers from the field of geographic information science. We encourage PhD and Master students as well as post-docs to submit papers. Participants of GI-Days 2007 will learn about the diversity of currently ongoing research projects and receive feedback on their research in a constructive and international atmosphere.

Short papers (max 1000 words) can be submitted to present visionary ideas, work in progress and preliminary research results, whereas full papers (max 6000 words) should present substantial results. All papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Papers must be written and presented in English.

All accepted papers will be published in the ifgiPrints series (with ISBN). We will ask the authors of the best full papers to submit extended versions for a special issue in a geographic information science journal.

We invite you to be part of the up-and-coming generation of geographic information scientists meeting at GI-Days 2007.

Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:

• Spatial data infrastructures
• Geospatial semantic web
• Geographic information in Web 2.0
• Geospatial web services
• Geospatial ontology engineering
• Semantic annotation of geospatial data sources
• Similarity and geospatial concept representation
• Sensor web services and sensor networks
• Location-based services, mobile and ubiquitous geo-computing
• Space time analysis and modelling
• Privacy in information management
• Algorithms and data structures
• Functional programming in geo-applications
• Self-organizing maps
• Map-algebra services
• Disaster and risk management
• Social aspects of geospatial information
• Dealing with uncertainty in geographic information
• Cognitive aspects of spatial knowledge

Tutorials

Tutorials on topics like the following are planned:

• How does science work?
  Publications, communities, networking.
• How to organize a research project?
  Hypothesis, methods, management, writing.
• How does geoinformatics business work?
  Market, players, customers, trends, opportunities.

Senior researchers interested in holding such a tutorial are invited to contact us at info@gi-days.de

Deadlines

Submission deadline for full papers: March 31.
Notification full papers: May 7.
Camera-ready full papers: June 30.

Submission deadline for abstracts: May 21.
Notification abstracts: June 24.
Camera-ready abstracts: July 19.

Further Information

Check http://www.gi-days.de for further information. Please address all correspondence to info@gi-days.de.

The podcast for the presentations at GIScience 2006 in Münster is online. You can find it at http://www.giscience.org/ > Program > Program Podcast, or simply subscribe to the RSS Feed directly. You can also search the iTunes podcast directory for GIScience and subscribe there, but iTunes does not show the links to the presentation slides.

The first talks and slides are already up and waiting to be downloaded, and we will add the remaining recordings during the next days and weeks.

Standards set by the OGC usually lack simplicity. They are specified by and for the business world. This is of course perfectly valid: Web services are normally used for B2B transactions. But due to too many companies taking part in the standardisation process, results usually are an agglomeration of ideas, rendering the standards too complex for non-professionals.

Times changed: with the appereance of web mapping tools (and APIs) from Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, geographic information got ubiquitous. Clever people started to mix the free available geodata with other, formerly non-spatial information. Mash-Ups combine pictures, blogs, calendars, and other with such maps. Lots of data got suddenly spatially encoded, making new user interaction techniques formerly restricted to GIS available to web applications. Companies noticed this development and reacted. Mash-Ups (and now we are in presence) are getting professional, take the new geotagging functionality by Flickr as example.

So, big companies + paying non-professional web user on the one hand, OGC on the other hand. It seems to be obvious that OGC has to change. Google is already member of OGC, I doubt that Yahoo and Microsoft will wait much longer. Not too long ago members of the OGC released a white paper about ways to incorporate GeoRSS. RSS is used to aggregate information, GeoRSS is an extension adds simple spatial features. And it is upward compatible to GML. Flickr is using it: you can use a GeoRSS compatible Feedreader to show the last 20 pictures of, let’s say, Münster. In my opinion (there are other opinions as well of course) this could be a great chance for OGC to see simplified (but upward compatible) versions of their standards used by the new community-based online platforms. OGC only has to create these robust, efficient and simple to implement beginner-versions of their standards.

Otherwise we will get contra standards like the Simple Catalog Interface.

We have set up a page for conferences that might be of interest for people working in the field of geographic information science. If you want us to add your conference to the lis, just drop us a line!

Just to make those of you who cannot attend GIScience a bit envious of the participants: There is a Flickr Set with some pictures of last night’s gala dinner at Nordkirchen castle.

Krysztof Janowicz gave a talk entitled “Towards a Similarity-Based Identitiy Assumption Service for Historical Places” at GIScience yesterday. The slides for he used are now online over at his Similarity Blog.

I just heard a really interesting talk by Antony Galton and James Hood here at GIScience. They developed a model for vague spatial information. For instance, it is hard to define the boundaries of central London. What we do know though is that central London lies inside greater London, and that the most important subway stations are inside central London. Spoken in anchoring terms, central London is anchored in greater London, and anchored over the subway stations of Picadilly Circus, Notting Hill Gate, etc. So the basic idea is to anchore vague spatial information in certain spatial information, and thus make it a bit more certain. This approach finally allows us to include these vague data in computations now.

GIScience kicked off here in Münster today with a series of five workshops. I joined the one on The Cognitive Approach to Modeling Environments (CAME), and one of the most interesting topics for discussion was brought up by Clare Davies from Ordnance Survey: Is there actually another spatial task than wayfinding that most people are familiar with, and that could thus serve as a good use case for research on spatial behavior, cognition, etc.?

We had quite a long discussion about this topic, but there was hardly anything brought up that is not related to wayfinding at all. Some sub-tasks of wayfinding like orientation were discussed, but most other ideas - like spatial planning, for example - are tasks for specific professional users.

So maybe we will have to look at wayfinding some more, unless someone reading this has a clever idea what could be the next big thing in terms of THE use case.

Two more days until this year’s GIScience conference starts - for the first time in Europe, here in Münster. Since some (maybe even all) of this blog’s authors are going to be there, you can expect lots of news from the world of geographic information science on gisblog.net during the next few days.