Geospatial Minds for Society – GI_Forum 2016 in Retrospect

Led by the Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics - Z_GIS and the GIScience Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1200 participants from 36 countries benefited from a variety of topics covered across 56 technical sessions, 20 workshops and 13 special fora linked by the conference motto “open:spatial:interfaces”. To name just a few: ‘Integrated Assessment of Risk and Vulnerability’ was discussed for a full day, just as ‘Spatial Perspectives on Transportation Systems’, ‘GI-Curriculum Design 2.0’ and ‘Education’. GI_Forum continues to be a rich blend of different people with different experiences, which makes it a highly productive and inspiring conference.

The keynotes, invited speeches and panel discussions focused on the interrelated themes of big data, open data, open source software and standards, data science, education for spatial thinking and spatial citizenship. Keynotes included Harvey Miller (Ohio State University, USA), Katharyne Mitchell (University of Washington, USA) and Anita Graser (Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria). Keynote speakers were also available at the Young Researchers’ Corner consulting graduate students through more intimate discussions related to research practice and projects, career planning and opportunities for academic exchange in line with the conference policy of providing special care for young researchers.

This year the best student paper award was presented to Mario Dolancic for his paper “Automatic Lane Level Road Network Graph Generation from Floating Car Data”. Erik Jakobi und Inga Gryl from University of Duisburg-Essen received the best poster award for "Lions, hunger and sea monsters - assessing children´s concepts of the world with map art". In-house social events as well as the AGIT EXPO and hands-on workshops provided a full overview of both GIScience and GI-industry and led to the development of new and dissemination of current R&D initiatives.

• www.gi-forum.org