Human individuals at the centre of attention at the GI_Forum 2018

Most of us constantly carry a mobile phone, which produces an even more detailed and continuous personal-level location history. At the same time, location raises concerns about privacy and security. The human individual is set at the detailed end of a space-time scale range: today‘s pervasive positioning empowers operational geoinformatics across scales. Human individuals were at the centre of attention at the 2018 GI_Forum, which took place from July 3 – 6 in Salzburg, Austria.

Almost 1,000 participants from 35 countries could choose from 17 sessions, 4 workshops and 7 special sessions in GI_Forum alone. Many of these participants are young researchers gathering their first conference participation, presentation and journal publication experiences.

GI_Forum 2018, the 12th annual conference along with its sister conference, AGIT, was held at the University of Salzburg, Austria. It was organised by the University of Salzburg, under the coordination of the Department of Geoinformatics – Z_GIS and in cooperation with the GIScience Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Special Sessions from Big Earth Data to Healthy Mobility
Representatives of research and development, and the business sector met and discussed current trends in GIScience and best practice solutions with end users. The 2018 special sessions included a wide variety of topics, which were discussed in depth with the participants. This year’s keynotes came from both, academia and industry. the speakers shared their views of advances in GIScience and Technology with lecture halls full of participants willing to engage in lively discussion.

2018 Awards

• This year’s best student paper presented at the conference was awarded to Florian Ledermann, TU Vienna for his contribution entitled “Analysing Digital Maps Online: A Reverse Engineering Approach“.
• Julia Schmitz, Jonas Pieper, Natalie Baier, Verena Vogt und Jürgen Schweikart of Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin won the competition for best poster.
• Luke Clasper and Marijke Bekkema presented their contributions as winners of the UNIGIS International Association Award. Rafael Titz was awarded this year’s Esri grant.

GI_Forum Journal
GI_Forum publishes high quality original research across the transdisciplinary field of Geographic Information Science (GIScience) in two issues annually. The journal provides a platform for dialogue among GI-Scientists and educators, technologists and critical thinkers in an ongoing effort to advance the field and ultimately contribute to the creation of an informed GISociety. Submissions concentrate on innovation in education, science, methodology and technologies in the spatial domain and their role towards a more just, ethical and sustainable science and society. GI_Forum implements the policy of open access publication following a double-blind peer review process through an international team of established scientists and field experts for quality assurance. Special emphasis is put on actively supporting young scientists through formative reviews of their submissions. Only English language contributions are considered for publication.

The Call for Papers for the GI_Forum 2019 opens on October 1, 2018. For more information visit www.gi-forum.org.