Advances in Geo-Spatial Information Science presents recent advances regarding fundamental issues of geo-spatial information science (space and time, spatial analysis, uncertainty modeling and geo-visualization), and new scientific and technological research initiatives for geo-spatial information science (such as spatial data mining, mobile data modeling, and location-based services). The book contains selected and revised papers presented at the joint International Conference on Theory, Data Handling and Modelling in GeoSpatial Information Science (Hong Kong, 26 28 May 2010), and brings together three related international academic communities: spatial information science, spatial data handling, and modeling geographic systems.

Advances in Geo-Spatial Information Science will be of interest for academics and professionals interested in spatial information science, spatial data handling, and modeling of geographic systems.

Geographic information systems have developed rapidly in the past decade, and are now a major class of software, with applications that include infrastructure maintenance, resource management, agriculture, Earth science, and planning. But a lack of standards has led to a general inability for one GIS to interoperate with another. It is difficult for one GIS to share data with another, or for people trained on one system to adapt easily to the commands and user interface of another. Failure to interoperate is a problem at many levels, ranging from the purely technical to the semantic and the institutional. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is about efforts to improve the ability of GISs to interoperate, and has been assembled through a collaboration between academic researchers and the software vendor community under the auspices of the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and the Open GIS Consortium Inc. It includes chapters on the basic principles and the various conceptual frameworks that the research community has developed to think about the problem. Other chapters review a wide range of applications and the experiences of the authors in trying to achieve interoperability at a practical level. Interoperability opens enormous potential for new ways of using GIS and new mechanisms for exchanging data, and these are covered in chapters on information marketplaces, with special reference to geographic information. Institutional arrangements are also likely to be profoundly affected by the trend towards interoperable systems, and nowhere is the impact of interoperability more likely to cause fundamental change than in education, as educators address the needs of a new generation of GIS users with access to a new generation of tools. The book concludes with a series of chapters on education and institutional change. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is suitable as a secondary text for graduate level courses in computer science, geography, spatial databases, and interoperability and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.

Geographic information systems have developed rapidly in the past decade, and are now a major class of software, with applications that include infrastructure maintenance, resource management, agriculture, Earth science, and planning. But a lack of standards has led to a general inability for one GIS to interoperate with another. It is difficult for one GIS to share data with another, or for people trained on one system to adapt easily to the commands and user interface of another. Failure to interoperate is a problem at many levels, ranging from the purely technical to the semantic and the institutional. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is about efforts to improve the ability of GISs to interoperate, and has been assembled through a collaboration between academic researchers and the software vendor community under the auspices of the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and the Open GIS Consortium Inc. It includes chapters on the basic principles and the various conceptual frameworks that the research community has developed to think about the problem. Other chapters review a wide range of applications and the experiences of the authors in trying to achieve interoperability at a practical level. Interoperability opens enormous potential for new ways of using GIS and new mechanisms for exchanging data, and these are covered in chapters on information marketplaces, with special reference to geographic information. Institutional arrangements are also likely to be profoundly affected by the trend towards interoperable systems, and nowhere is the impact of interoperability more likely to cause fundamental change than in education, as educators address the needs of a new generation of GIS users with access to a new generation of tools. The book concludes with a series of chapters on education and institutional change. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is suitable as a secondary text for graduate level courses in computer science, geography, spatial databases, and interoperability and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.

The GIScience conference series was founded in 2000 with the goal of providing a forum for researchers interested in advancing the fundamental aspects of the prod- tion, dissemination, and use of geographic information. The conference is held bi- nually and attracts people from academia, industry, and government across a host of disciplines including cognitive science, computer science, engineering, geography, information science, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, social science, and stat- tics. Following a very successful conference in Münster, Germany in 2006, this year’s conference was held in Park City, Utah, USA, the prior site of the 2002 Winter Ol- pics and home to the annual Sundance Film Festival. There are two forms of submission to the conference: full papers of 6000 words or less and extended abstracts of 500-1000 words for either a presentation or poster. This format was originally designed to capture the cultural difference between researchers who prefer to publish a peer-reviewed conference paper and those who would rather submit an abstract covering work in progress. This year 77 full papers were submitted and reviewed by 3 Program Committee members, of which 24 were selected for pr- entation and inclusion in this volume. Of the 115 extended abstracts that were subm- ted and reviewed by 2 Program Committee members, 47 were accepted for an oral presentation and 25 were accepted for presentation as a poster. The abstracts were published in a second booklet and are available on the GIScience website (http://www. giscience. org).