Call for Participation
Discovering Geographic Knowledge in Data-Rich Environments
Redmond, Washington
March 18-20, 1999
Project Varenius of the National Center for Geographic Information and
Analysis (NCGIA) is seeking interested researchers to participate in a
3-day specialists meeting on Discovering Geographic Knowledge in Data-Rich
Environments. The meeting will be held March 18-20, 1999, at Microsoft
in Redmond, WA. The purpose of the workshop is to identify and prioritize
a research agenda for the topic. The structure of the meeting will
be a combination of plenary sessions to identify and debate major issues
and directions, and small-group discussions about more specific topics.
Partial or full support for lodging and travel to the meeting may be available
to participants.
Initiative Description
Digital geographic datasets are growing exponentially and under such activities
as the development of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, the launching
of new satellite systems with higher resolutions, and the day-to-day collection
of digital imagery, video, and sound. Society has changed from being data-poor
to data-rich, while our techniques for deriving knowledge from the data
in an analytical context have remained inferential in nature. The problem
has now become not finding the data, but filtering through large volumes
of data to finding meaningful geographic knowledge. At the same time, the
types of datasets available are changing from the traditional vector and
raster sets, to include such data types as video and audio, and the location
of where these data were collected. We must overcome these limitations
and develop new approaches and methods that focus upon separating the relevant
from the irrelevant, the meaningful from the background noise. The goal
of this initiative is to find new automated methods for filtering large
amounts of raw geographic data into more user-consumable forms of knowledge.
This includes:
-
spatial data mining
-
content-based and knowledge-based retrieval
-
development of multi-media spatial data types
-
on-line analytic processing
-
refinement of non-parametric statistics
-
incorporation of computational intelligence techniques (such as neural
networks and AI expert systems) into spatial data analysis
Proposals to participate in the workshop should consist of three parts:
-
a brief indication of why you want to participate in the meeting, why you
are interested, and/or what you would contribute (1 page);
-
a position statement or research abstract, describing a particular element
of or perspective on the topic (2-3 pages); and
-
a brief curriculum vitae with up to five (5) selected publications most
relevant to the topic (1 page).
Proposals should be in one of the following formats (ordered by preference):
All submissions will be reviewed by Initiative co-Leaders and by the Steering
Committee. Participation in the workshop will be limited to 25-35.
Important dates
Deadline for receiving applications: January 18, 1999
Notification of acceptance: February 1, 1999
Specialist meeting: March 18-20, 1999
