Conference Topics

The joint conference invites presentations covering the full range of practice, development and research experiences that advance the practice and theory of spatially enabling government, industry and citizens. This includes advancing the theory and practice of spatial data infrastructure development in all of its forms.

• Spatially enabling government through information infrastructure development in support of such applications as land administration, disaster prevention and management, emergency response, transportation planning, e-government such as online permit and license services, environmental monitoring and similar spatially-dependent functions of government.
• Spatially enabling industry through information infrastructure development to improve decision making in support of applications such as enterprise operation management, facilities and property management, fleet management, product tracking, direct marketing, environmental and resource management and through development of consumer products and services. This conference has a special interest in highlighting existing and emerging uses of spatial technologies in the energy sector with emphasis on uses within the oil, gas and renewable energy industries including uses for site evaluation and pipe and power line siting and management.
• Spatially enabling citizens through emerging participatory, inclusive or collaborative approaches in developing geospatial content and building infrastructure. This topical area includes efforts and approaches incorporating concepts such as participatory GIS, volunteered geographic information, crowd sourcing, use of mobile technologies and real-time wireless feeds, geoweb tools, data commons sharing approaches, and open source or cloud-shared software approaches.
• Experiences and case studies reporting on spatial data infrastructure development in all of its existing and emerging forms at local, regional, national and multi-national levels and their evaluation.
• Technical challenges in design and development of depositories, portals, and registries for geographic data, metadata and services including but not limited to issues surrounding interoperability, content and meta data standards, web map services, web feature services, web coverage services and catalogue services as well as emerging architecures incorporating such concepts as cloud computing.
• Legal, economic and institutional challenges in implementing spatial data infrastructure concepts, components, systems and geospatial technologies. These challenges and the approaches to addressing them might include but are not limited to such topics as (a) barriers to and methods for achieving success in sharing geospatial data, (b) alternative methods and models for planning, financing and implementing spatial data infrastructure or related initiatives, and (c) policies supporting creation and responsible management of spatial data infrastructure resources.
• Basic and applied research in advancing spatial data infrastructure theory and concepts including but limited to studies addressing spatial data integration, interoperability, presentation of spatial information, quality issues, space and time aspects of social networking, spatial decision-support systems and social science research germane to the use, value and management of geospatial information.
• Assessment and measurement in determining whether infrastructure initiatives are actually achieving such goals as: (a) increasing efficiency and effectiveness in the management of information; (b) helping to advance health, education, social welfare, security, and safety; (c) better managing resources such as oceans, forests, roads, rivers, property and housing; and (d) similar societal goals.
• Education and capacity building efforts. In additional to educational initiatives and capacity builing generally, this topic includes the particular challenges faced by developing nations and progress made in developing geospatial information infrastructure and garnering international support.