What is special about Geospatial?

Today the AGIT 2008 will end and in my opinion it was a great event.

Starting with the keynote from Mike Goodchild with the topic ASSERTION AND AUTHORITY: USER-GENERATED GEOGRAPHIC CONTENT. He talks about Web 2.0 mechanisms for compiling and distributing massive amounts of information volunteered by users and the role of Geographic Information in this context. He shows some differences between traditional approaches to generate geographic content form authoritative sources. The talk includes some examples for volunteered geographic information (VGI); the motivations that drive it, its accuracy, its value to science, its preservation, and a number of other issues. In his opinion (and also mine) VGI is likely to play an increasingly important role in spatial data infrastructure in the coming years. Form the content of the presentation most thinks are well known and is not new anymore but it is an experience to see such a keynote live.

There are several other great talks covering many different areas of Geoinformatics. For example there was a talk about the Geoportal of Rheinland-Pfalz from the WhereGroup using Open source Web-GIS solutions, or one talk about the use of GIS in the Austrian Federal Ministery of Interior (BMI). A. Zipf and P. Neis talk about OpenLS and OpenStreetMaps in OpenRouteService.org. In another Block he explains the processing of Digital Terrain Models (DTM) via Grid computing.

Of course the quality of the talks and presentation is very broad. They range from product presentations for different companies of the GI sector, which are more or less advertisements to sophisticated and high quality talks with academic background.

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.