U.S. NATIONAL CENTER FOR GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION AND ANALYSIS
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DISCRETE GLOBAL GRIDS
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA, USA,
MARCH 26-28, 2000

The ability to specify geographic location is fundamental to many areas of science and many human activities. In addition to latitude/longitude, horizontal/vertical datums and rectangular coordinate systems such as UTM, new approaches to tessellating planets -- often involving triangulations, some of which are hierarchical -- have been developed by researchers in a variety of domains to satisfy a range of scientific objectives. Papers describing some of these efforts have appeared, and conference sessions have been organized to discuss them, but no international conference has yet been convened to specifically address discrete global grids (DGG) either theoretically or from perspectives of applications they can serve. The meeting described in this Call for Papers is intended to fill this void, and all workers in DGG-related areas are strongly encouraged to participate. Many disciplines are interested in methods for gridding the curved surface of the Earth. They include:

• Statistics: sampling schemes and statistical models over the Earth's surface;
• Geographic information systems and science: georeferencing, data structures and indexing schemes for global data, global visualization, and Digital Earth;
• Remote sensing: consistent schemes for global imagery;
• Environmental modeling: finite difference and finite element schemes for solution of partial differential equations in global system modeling;
• Digital libraries: methods to support search, assessment, and retrieval of global geospatial and georeferenced data from distributed servers.

This conference will bring researchers together from many different disciplines to share advances in the rapidly developing fields of discrete global grids, global coordinate systems, and global georeferencing, and their applications. The program will include keynote presentations, contributed papers, demonstrations, and informal discussions.

The conference will be held in the Radisson Hotel on the Santa Barbara waterfront. It will begin with a reception and keynote presentation on Sunday evening March 26, and continue through Tuesday March 28, 2000. It is being organized by the Santa Barbara site of the U.S. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, by a steering committee chaired by Michael Goodchild (UCSB), and including Noel Cressie (Ohio State), Geoffrey Dutton (Spatial Effects), Nick Faust (Georgia Tech), Ralph Kahn (JPL), Tony Olsen (EPA), Denis White (EPA), Hrvoje Lukatela (Geodyssey), and Jon Kimerling (Oregon State).

Papers are invited that address any aspect of global grids. Suitable topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Interoperability of and with global grids; compatibility issues for different grid schemes, and global grids as a medium of exchange for geospatial data.
• Data quality issues; what kinds of positional error and distortions do different schemes have, what are the consequences, and for whom and why do they matter.
• Application of discrete global grid systems in survey designs for environmental and natural resources.
• Alternative discrete global grid systems based on platonic polyhedra.
• Discrete global grids in atmospheric and ocean modeling.
• Spatial analyses using hierarchical structures in discrete global grids.
• Graphics and visualization based on discrete global grids.
• Efficient addressing schemes for hierarchical discrete global grids.