Strategic Enhancement of NGA's Geographic Information Science Infrastructure

Upham Hotel, Santa Barbara, California, USA
December 2-4, 2004

The US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) will host a specialist meeting in December on the topic of geospatial interoperability, as part of a two-year research project being funded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at the three sites of NCGIA (the University of California, Santa Barbara, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Maine).

The meeting will focus on four subthemes, each of which presents significant issues for interoperability:

• Syntactic interoperability, and the adequacy of current metadata standards;
  
• Semantic interoperability, and technologies for overcoming differences of meaning;
  
• Accuracy, and the ability of data sets of different accuracy to interoperate;
  
• Spatial support, and technologies for resampling and interpolation.

Further discussion of each of these themes can be found on the project website, via http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/.

The specialist meeting will bring together researchers from academia, government, and the private sector in a two-day program of keynotes, plenary and small-group discussions, and informal interaction. As with all NCGIA specialist meetings, its objectives will be to survey the state of the art, to identify and prioritize research topics, and to build a community of interested researchers.

Interested individuals are asked to send a 2-page position paper on one or more of the meeting themes and a one-page biosketch to Michael Goodchild (good@geog.ucsb.edu) no later than 15 October, 2004. All applicants will be notified of their participation status by 18 October, 2004, and position papers of accepted participants will be electronically distributed prior to the meeting. For additional questions about submissions and meeting details, please contact Matt Rice (rice@geog.ucsb.edu).

US participants will receive travel reimbursements for economy class airfare, accommodations, and meal expenses. Government and international participants should contact Christian Brown (christian@ncgia.ucsb.edu) for reimbursement details.