GIScience Colloquium - Risk Information Management – The Complexity Challenge

Date: Monday, May, 12, 2014; 12:30 – 13:30
Place: Techno-Z, ZGIS-meeting room: SC30EG0.E07 (Schillerstraße 30, building 15)
Presenter: Horst Kremers, DGfK Kommission „Risiken, Katastrophen, Sicherheit“, Berlin

Risk Information Management – The Complexity Challenge
There is growing recognition of information need in all the complex phases of disaster risk prevention. All actors make their decisions and have their situational information need for doing so. The dynamics of situation development not only need to be observed, described, and modeled, but also the consequences on population and environment need to be anticipated, alternatives discussed and the typical dynamic recursiveness of management practice needs to be fully supported.

We currently are far from satisfying implementations for such tasks. In this presentation, the principal needs of appropriate pre-disaster situation modeling, pre-implemented information availability, collection, analysis and flow, elements of risk information infrastructure, information mining in disaster big data, and formal process description are highlighted and presented for discussion.

Special Issue: Journal Cartography and Geographic Information Science

Z_GIS with its Doctoral College GIScience publishes a complete issue of the renowned journal Cartography and Geographic Information Science. Researchers from Salzburg and colleagues involved in teaching, supervision and joint research illustrates the wealth of aspect associated to the spatial lens in multidisciplinary research.

This special issue covers two main sections with three and four articles each and one introductory paper reflecting on the multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic field of GISc. The first of the two main sections is titled “Representations and Spatial Data Models” and includes three methodological papers that suggest novel ways of spatial data representations and models. The second main section “GIScience Research with User Generated Content and Big Data” summarizes the main contributions of four papers that utilize user generated content and big data and apply them to spatial planning, mobility patterns, and movement measures.

Geographic information science: a multi-disciplinary and multi-paradigmatic discipline - Journal Cartography and Geographic Information Science. Special Issue Volume 41, Issue 3, 2014

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Z_GIS is the 75th member of ICA-OSGeo labs

Since April 2014 Z_GIS is the 75th member of ICA-OSGeo labs. It is an important milestone for Z_GIS to be part of the "Geo for All" initiative. Prof. Dr. Josef Strobl also is serving as an Advisory Board member of ICA-OSGeo Labs.

In September 2011, the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the International Cartographic Association (ICA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the aim of developing collaboration opportunities on a global basis for academia, industry and government organizations, with a focus on open source geospatial software and open data.

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Workshop: The role of networks in disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA)

27 – 28 May 2014

University of Salzburg
Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics - Z_GIS

The risk from natural hazards is projected to further increase in many regions due to a growing exposure of human activities often combined with increased vulnerability and the projected increase in frequency and intensity of hazards due to effects of global warming. For the development and implementation of (more) effective risk reduction policies, a close collaboration and knowledge exchange between decision makers, the scientific community, the private sector and civil society is needed.

In practice, however, knowledge on disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation is often fragmented within,  and  among the  different stakeholders, and thus not adequately incorporated in decisions on disaster risk reduction and the implementation of risk mitigation and adaptation measures. This has been identified as an important reason, why the significant increase in available knowl- edge on natural disasters and their causes and drivers is not as effective as expect- ed in minimising disaster losses.

Networks will likely take on an increasingly significant role for DRR and CCA because of their capacity to bring stakeholders together to share experiences, increase the knowledge base and thus facilitate improved decision-making by stakeholders in policy and practice.

This workshop aims to bring together representatives of various networks from the DRR and CCA community – as well as any complementary fields - in order to identify synergies, develop common understanding of the challenges being addressed by the networks and the approaches being used, and find new ways of   working   together.

GIScience colloquium

Date: Tuesday, May, 6, 2014;  17:00 – 18:00
Place: Techno-Z, GI-lecture room: SC30OG1.107  (Schillerstraße 30, building 14)
Presenter: Michael Hodgson (Visiting professor from University of South Carolina)

Uncovering Cognitive Processes used in Image Interpretation as Fundamental to OBIA-based Modeling

The trend in the use of remotely sensed imagery for mapping land use/cover information has shifted from coarse spatial resolutions and automated information extraction to fine spatial resolution imagery and human visual analysis.  Considerable research is directed to developing accurate methods for automatically extracting such land use/cover classes.   However, many automated extraction methods, even those claiming to embody perceptual/cognitive principles, are inferior to the capabilities of human visual analysis.   A better understanding of how humans interpret remotely sensed imagery would help to improve automated extraction methods, particularly if we claim to develop systems that are knowledge-based, expert, or founded on perceptual/cognitive theories.

Researches in image cognition and object-based image analysis have common application goals but dissimilar research goals and approaches.  In this presentation, novel approaches using eye-tracking and other perceptual methods for measuring how experienced image analysts interpret imagery are discussed.  This presentation is meant to elicit active dialogue on the opportunities for combined efforts in OBIA or cognitive research.