GIScience - connecting the Real and Virtual Worlds

Dimensions and Directions of Live Geography

2012-01-23T23:23:00.000+01:00

In early February, Prof Josef Strobl will speak at the India Geospatial Forum Plenary Panel on Dimensions and Directions of Geospatial Technology. Any comments on the position outlined below? Please email josef.strobl[at]sbg.ac.at ...

Within the many developments and innovations defining today’s emerging next generation of geospatial technologies, the perspective on real-time enabled applications is one of the most promising trends widening the scope of applied Geography and GIScience.

Real-time, or ‘live’ applications first and foremost depend on online connectivity among distributed components in geospatial architectures, with a particular focus on mobile clients and sensors. Three use case scenarios shall illustrate the power and potential of live GIS:

People as Sensors: the idea of volunteered geographic information has evolved from static database entries towards live citizen feedback, and spun off the phenomenon of huge amounts of involuntary geographic information derived from cell phone tracking. Being able to monitor crowds and to receive instantaneous feedback from citizens introduces a fundamental change in managing mobility, security and resources.
Augmented Reality: mobile devices in vehicles, for field work and in particular in smart phones use current location, direction and movement for merging a real-time view with spatial database content like roads, underground infrastructure, parcel boundaries or architectural designs. Dynamic changes from the database (e.g., navigating to a new destination, different state of a utility element) are represented in the display and allow immediate adjustment of user actions.
Sensor Webs: ubiquitous sensors, whether mobile or in-situ, increasingly serve as the ‘sensory skin’ covering our environments, infrastructures and the entire planet. Readings of meteorological, environmental and technical status variables as well as movement and change indicators are relayed back, facilitating appropriate reactions by stakeholders and public agencies.

Many applications built on a live flow of data and live geoprocessing quite naturally are cloud-based, including generic as well as purpose-built clients. This not only enables dynamic, real-time visualization, but more importantly facilitates significantly shortened feedback loops for control and management. While obviously e.g. emergency scenarios are priority use cases for live geospatial concepts, numerous other application domains will benefit from real-time enabled architectures.

Much of the true power of GIS is in live GIS, making us 'aLive Geographers'!

Announcement: COGeo 2012 in Salzburg

2012-01-18T11:42:00.001+01:00

2012, the COGeo event will be integrated into the PANGEO Austria 2012 (September 15-20, 2012) conference.

Session 18: State-of-the-art in geoscience 3D modeling – systems and applications,
Robert Marschallinger & Fritz Zobl

Geoscience data are intrinsically volume-related and a choice of software exists for the handling of static and dynamic, process-related solid models. This session welcomes innovative approaches to multi-dimensional analysis, modeling, simulation and visualization in the geosciences.

Deadline for Abstracts (= deadline for presentations and posters): 30. 06. 2012
Abstracts: max. 200 words / 1500 characters
Submission are welcome in English and German!

The annual COGeo conference takes place in Salzburg and is mainly organised by the Institute for Geographic Information Science. Programme Chairs and Organization: Robert Marschallinger and Fritz Zobl (ÖAW-GIScience).
>> www.cogeo.at
>> PANGEO Austria 2012

GI_Forum 2012 - Final Call for Papers

2012-01-11T09:24:00.003+01:00

GI_Forum 2012
Geovisualisation, Society & Learning
July 3 - 6, 2012 | Salzburg, Austria

Audience. The interdisciplinary GI_Forum focuses on an international audience, communicating in English, and sharing an interest in translating theory, methods and techniques into a broad range of GI application domains. Young researchers are especially invited to contribute and discuss their research; together with established scientists they will find a vibrant community from academia, business, and education to analyse progress and to explore new research directions.

Themes & Application Fields. GI_Forum 2012 offers full-fledged, intertwined tracks on GIScience & Technology and Learning with GI with a focus on geovisualization, society and learning, and their inter-relationships.
Keynotes by Sara Fabrikant, Muki Hakley, Alan MacEachran and Georg Gartner support the 2012 GI Forum special focus.
We welcome theoretical, technical and empirical work. Topics within the special focus include, but are not limited to:

Advanced visualization and cartography

Visual analytics

Spatial information & society

Critical GIS / cartography

Education for Spatial Citizenship

Spatial thinking in education

Spatial Data Infrastructures for education

The GI_Forum further solicits contributions on emerging topics and research outcomes related to GIScience and GI-based education. Geospatial data acquisition, advanced spatial analysis and knowledge extraction, distributed and mobile services, SDI, global change & vulnerability, dynamic modelling and simulation, learning environments for secondary / postsecondary education, and research into learning outcomes, comprise by no means an exhaustive list of conference topics.

Submission: Types & Deadlines. GI_Forum 2012 gives authors choices about the type of submission they want to make in order to accommodate a variety of interdisciplinary contributions. Submissions must be in English language according to the formatting guidelines published at the conference website.

February 1, 2012: deadline for submission of full papers / extended abstracts
March 16, 2012: notification of acceptance
April 20, 2012: final paper versions
June 6, 2012: late deadline for submission of extended abstracts for poster presentation

We will accept online submissions only, starting from December, 1st 2011 at > www.gi-forum.org.

We are looking forward to your contribution!

Josef Strobl | Conference Chair
Adrijana Car | Programme Chair
Thomas Jekel | Programme Chair

> office@gi-forum.org

Geospatial World Forum 2012 - Z_GIS as Strategic Partner!

2011-12-08T22:51:00.017+01:00

The Centre for Geoinformatics at the University of Salzburg is a strategic institutional partner in Geospatial World Forum' 2012 being held in Amsterdam, Netherlands from 23rd to 27th April, 2012.

Z_GIS has been invited to organise a key seminar on 'Realtime Geoinformatics - Live Geography' and Prof. Josef Strobl (Director of Z_GIS) serves as the chair of this seminar. It will bring together industry leaders like Prof. Henk Scholten (CEO, Geodan, the Netherlands), Prof. Euro Beinat (VP, Location Solutions, Zebra Technologies, USA), Steven Ramage (Executive Director, Marketing and Communications, OGC) and many more.

As the premium global geospatial industry event, Geospatial World Forum will attract stakeholders, service providers, policy makers as well as end users to a common platform for debate, interaction and global networking.

Doc-fForte-fellowship for Antonia Osberger

2011-11-25T08:13:00.003+01:00

Antonia Osberger is a recipient of a DOC-fFORTE-fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Science for a period of three years. Her dissertation project has the topic: "Object-based image analysis for monitoring the impact of natural stressors in Alpine forest habitats".

The fellowship is financed by the Federal Ministry for Science and Research within the initiative “Women in Research and Technology – fFORTE”. The purpose of the programme is to enable young, excellent female doctoral candidates from the natural and life sciences, from mathematics, medicine and technical sciences to carry out their dissertation project.

ITB Indonesia invited Z_GIS for a conference keynote!

2011-11-17T14:02:00.000+01:00

The Institute of Technology Bandung, Indonesia organised 'The 4th International Remote Sensing and GIS Workshop Series on Demography, Land Use-Land Cover and Disaster' on 10th November, 2011 and invited Z_GIS from University of Salzburg for giving the leading keynote presentation. Dr. Shahnawaz, on behalf of Z_GIS, gave the presentation on 'Environment-Development Interface in Mountain Ecosystems' and discussed the socio-economic dyamics of Himalayan societies. His specific case study from the Western Himalayas followed an ecosystem approach and analysed the interplay of human activities as a response to the local natural environment. The presetation was supported with various spatial models and the dynamics of various changes from 1881 to 2011 were demonstrated through an integrated simulation.

2011-11-15T15:09:00.001+01:00

GI_Forum 2012 - First Call for Papers

2011-11-09T09:48:00.004+01:00

Linking Geovisualization, Society & Learning

GI_Forum 2012 offers full-fledged, intertwined tracks on GIScience and -technology and Learning with GI with a focus on geovisualization, society and learning, and their inter-relationships. We welcome theoretical, technical and empirical work. Topics within the special focus include, but are not limited to:

Advanced visualization and cartography
Visual analytics
Spatial information & society
Critical GIS / cartography
Education for Spatial Citizenship
Spatial thinking in education
Spatial Data Infrastructures for education

We will accept online submissions only, starting from December, 1^st2011 at www.gi-forum.org to February 1^st, 2012.

For further information please visit www.gi-forum.org

2nd SPATIALreason Workshop completed at University of the Philippines!

2011-11-08T21:52:00.000+01:00

The second GIScience faculty development workshop on ‘Integrating Spatial Reasoning in Interdisciplinary Research and Education’ started on November 4th and was concluded on Nov 8th. During the inaugural function, Dr. Ranjit Singh Rey representing the Dean of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines (UP) highlighted the relevance of GIScience and technologies and congratulated the organisers for inviting 22 participants from leading universities in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand.

Dr. Darlene Occena-Gutierrez, Head of Geography department, UP welcomed the participants and expressed immense pleasure and responsibility in hosting the workshop.Prof. Josef Strobl (Director, Z_GIS) delivered lectures on advanced spatial concepts and analytical methods and Dr. Shahnawaz (Z_GIS) guided the participants as how to integrate spatial reasoning and analysis in practical projects founded in a broad range of disciplines like Geography, Public Health, Economic Planning, Forestry, Environmental History, Anthropology etc.

The closing ceremony was chaired by Dr. Cristine DLR. Villagonzalo, Director, Extension Coordination office, UP. She witnessed the work of the participants through their presentations and distributed the certificates of successful completion to them.

Indonesia: 2nd National Symposium on Geoinformation Science!

2011-10-29T16:31:00.001+02:00

Z_GIS was invited to contribute to the 2nd ‘Simposium Nasional Sains Geinformasi 2011’ organised at the National University of Indonesia - Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta on 27/28 October 2011. Dr. Shahnawaz represented Z_GIS and delivered a keynote on ‘Global Geospatial Services Facilitating Local Solutions’ in which he presented the advent of GIScience from desktop based GIS confined to GIS laboratories to webGIS and now moving to cloudGIS

He highlighted that the nature of GIS is changing from a possession or property state to an open service which can make a range of contributions in emergency response and disaster management.

Geospatial Disaster Management

2011-10-16T15:59:00.002+02:00

Prof. Josef Strobl (Chair of UNIGIS International and Director of Z_GIS) was invited to deliver the prestigious 'Professor S. P. Chatterjee Memorial Lecture' to the 31st Annual conference of the Indian National Cartographic Association (INCA). This highly anticipated lecture only is organised once every three years, as a tribute to the 'father of Indian Geography', who served as president of the IGU and received the highest scientific awards from his country.

Presenting this lecture, Prof. Strobl on Oct 15 in Chandigarh, India, spoke on "Map Interfaces for Disaster Management", discussing and demonstrating how GIScience and online geospatial techniques play very significant roles throughout the full disaster management cycle.

Alp-Water-Scarce Final Conference

2011-10-04T12:31:00.004+02:00

From September 19-21, 2011 the final Alp-Water-Scarce Conference (funded in the Alpine Space Programme) took place in Graz. On behalf of the Z_GIS team Hermann Klug, Peter Zalavari and Barbara Hochwimmer presented the WebGIS based Atlas as an output created by the University of Salzburg. This Atlas includes the Alp-Water-Scarce pilot sites. These pilot sites include results from the Alp-Water-Scarce partners responsible for each site. Additionally, as an endeavor to make people understand climate change, Z_GIS implemented a tool enabling users to request temperature and precipitation data from climate station data in a defined period of interest.

Further Austrian partners contributed to the final Alp-Water-Scarce results. The F ederal Institute for Agricultural Economics (AWI) reported on pan-alpine water scarcity impacts resulting from agricultural business while the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) was in charge of analyzing the impacts on water quality. The Federal Government of Styria was in charge of work package 5 "Water System Characterisation" while the Federal Government in Carinthia with its sub-contractors Joanneum Research, the Environmental Bureau Klagenfurt, and the Carinthian Lake Research institute was contributing to the Austrian/(Slovenian) pilot sites.

GS Soil Portal now provides access to datasets

2011-10-03T10:23:00.000+02:00

In the framework of the eContentplus programme (now called ICT PSP) the GS Soil project opened the GS Soil Portal for retrieval of seamlessly available soil data across Europe. The first testing phase has been successfully finished. Presently we are looking for volunteers further testing of the portal functionalities. We are also inviting all data providers to join our efforts towards a comprehensive soil portal, making soil datasets seamlessly searchable across Europe. In case you are interested please do not hesitate to contact the project coordinator Katharina Feiden.

Interreg IVa project: Prognosis models from Digital Elevation Models

2011-10-03T10:11:00.002+02:00

In the framework of an Interreg IVa project LIDAR datasets have been recorded in the Austrian-Bavarian border region (Salzburg, Tyrol, and Berchtesgaden). The pre-processed LIDAR data result in Digital Surface Models (DSM) and Digital Terrain Models (DTM) from which vegetation heights as normalized canopy height model (nCHM) have been extracted by using Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA) techniques.

The objective is to calculate vegetation based shadow areas for different time periods. This will be an input parameter for the evaluation of existing and planned alpine skiing slopes. In cooperation with the Centre for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG) a Snow Height Index (SHI) will be developed and spatially explicit represented for past, present and future snow heights at different years and times.

Duration: 04/2008 - 12/2011 (45 month)
Total Budget: 2 mio EUR

Opening of the international IAMG conference

2011-09-05T10:35:00.007+02:00

September 5-9 2011, the world cultural heritage city of Salzburg is the setting for IAMG 2011, the Annual Conference of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences.

The Conference is intended to be a forum for exchanging ideas on theory and the practical application of a broad spectrum of mathematical geosciences concepts, addressing a wide range of geoscientists and civil engineers, and providing opportunities for students and young scientists to engage with some of the best geosciences minds in the world.

Besides covering IAMG core topics like geostatistics, reservoir modeling, 3D modeling or geo-process simulation, IAMG 2011 contributions address applied mathematical geosciences issues with a specific reference to alpine regions: simulation and modeling in hydrogeology and engineering geology as well as geohazard modeling.

The broad thematic range of IAMG 2011 is organized in 22 sessions with a total of 164 peer-reviewed contributions, which are available as open-access publications on www.iamg2011.at.
Robert Marschallinger & Fritz Zobl, ÖAW-GIScience

C3 Alps Project accepted

2011-08-29T12:36:00.000+02:00

The project on "Capitalising Climate Change Knowledge for Adaptation in the Alpine Space" (C3-Alps) will synthesize, transfer, visualise and implement policy and practice results of previous Alpine Space climate change adaptation projects. The capitalisation approach aims at generating new and directly usable forms of state-of-the-art synthesis adaptation knowledge in the Alps. Harmonised findings and datasets across disciplinary sectors are made available for transparent and effective implementation of adaptation measures by decision-makers.

Effective, efficient and tailor-made communication and transfer of climate change impact findings are ensured to target groups in order to support governance frameworks and initiate cross-cutting adaptation processes, strategies, action plans and decision support in pilot regions and municipalities. To leverage sustainable impacts, the project will be driven by the information and user needs of target groups. By supporting bottom-up action. C3-Alps will contribute to implementation of national adaptation policies on regional and municipal levels and to advancement of national adaptation strategies.

Z_GIS will be active in spatially explicit decision support by collecting and synthesizing spatial datasets in a one-stop-shop Alpine portal.

Duration: 01/2012 - 12/2014 (36 month)
Total Budget: 3,1 mio EUR

SMART Project started

2011-08-25T07:37:00.001+02:00

This project on " Smart aquifer characterisation of New Zealand's aquifers" will identify, develop, apply, validate and optimise a suite of novel methods for accurate, rapid and cost-effective characterisation and mapping of New Zealand’s aquifer systems.

By 2017, the outputs from the research programme will be used nationally by stakeholders such as a regional authorities and will lead to better understanding of key aquifer systems. By 2020, national adoption of outputs from the research programme will have led to a demonstrable improvement in the management of groundwater and interconnected surface water systems.

Z_GIS will set-up an operational Sensor Observation Service in order to validate remote sensing applications done by partner institutions. Based on a harmonized Spatial Data Infrastructure of hydrological datasets a 3D WebGIS will be set-up and operating as a Decision Support System for New Zealand's stakeholders which a part of the project.

Duration: 07/2011 - 06/2017 (72 month)
Total Budget: 8,8 mio NZ$ (5,0 mio EUR)

Mathematical Geosciences: Interview with Robert Marschallinger in German

2011-08-24T13:06:00.003+02:00

Mathematische Geowissenschaften: Interview mit Robert Marschallinger vom ÖAW Institut für Geographic Information Science.

Die neuesten Entwicklungen der mathematischen Geowissenschaften stehen im Mittelpunkt einer internationalen Konferenz in Salzburg. Im Interview spricht Robert Marschallinger über das Wechselspiel zwischen Theorie und Praxis und die Vielfalt der Anwendungsmöglichkeiten geomathematischer Methoden. > Interview zum Nachlesen

International conference IAMG 2011 in Salzburg, September 5-9.
IAMG 2011 core topics are geostatistics, reservoir modelling, 3D modelling or geo-process simulation. The IAMG 2011 conference will also address applied mathematical geosciences issues with a specific reference to alpine regions: simulation and modelling in hydrogeology and engineering geology as well as geohazard modelling.
For more information in English, please visit the IAMG 2011 Website

SPATIALreason Workshop organised in Philippines!

2011-08-23T14:09:00.002+02:00

A week-long international workshop entitled 'Integrating Spatial Reasoning in Interdisciplinary Research and Education' and focussing on GIScience faculty development was conducted by the Centre for Geoinformatics (Z_GIS), University of Salzburg, Austria. The workshop was hosted by the Department of Geography (DGeog), University of the Philippines (UP), Diliman from 15th to 19th August, 2011 and was co-funded by ASEA Uninet, Austria.
Dr. Shahnawaz from Z_GIS delivered the workshop to 18 teachers and post-graduate students from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Dr. Darlene Occena-Gutierrez (DGeog, UP) observed that this was the first international workshop organised by the department exclusively for GIScience faculty development and this will enhance the presence and impact of GIScience education in the Philippines.

During the workshop, participants attended conceptual lectures about spatial reasoning and its integration with various disciplines as well as intensive hands-on training of GIS software for applying spatial reasoning in various application domains