Geoinformatics Forum 2014 in retrospect

In accordance with the motto “Geospatial Innovation for Society”, around 1100 participants from 40 countries attended GI_Forum and AGIT 2014 to exchange information on the latest trends in technological, analytical, societal and educational domains. This year 81 contributions were selected by the Programme Committee to be presented in oral and poster sessions. The Programme Committee chairs, Adrijana Car and Thomas Jekel, are very pleased with their quality: “The quality of papers presented this year was excellent. The reaction from the delegates and keynote speakers showed that GI_Forum has become an annual event that bridges the gap between technical development and academic research and their application for society. This clearly indicates a slight shift towards technologies, but with the end-user in mind.”

The GI_Forum contributions are available online at http://epub.oeaw.ac.at/gi_ forum. Like in 2013, our traditional publisher Wichmann/VDE VERLAG shared publishing duties with the Austrian Academ y of Sciences Press. This co-edition allows us to provide a hard-copy volume – which our readers are used to – as well as a professionally edited and fully indexed online edition of the GI_Forum contributions. The earlier “proceedings” now have evolved into an online journal, and measures have been taken for its indexing in relevant channels.

The AGIT EXPO offered a platform to 60 exhibiting companies to demonstrate the latest development trends in GI technologies and services. The stalls and events at and around the EXPO were intensively visited by the conference participants.

The four excellent keynote speakers – Andre Skupin, Christoph Schlieder, Michael Gould and Diana Sinton – linked in the overall conference topic and showed how GI research and development may support society, linking academic endeavour and societal needs. This year (a) the Comenius project SPACIT, (b) participants of a workshop on linked open data as well as (c) initiatives for use of GIS in health and education shared their insights at the GI_Forum. In the Young Researchers’ Corner young scientists met the keynote speakers in an informal atmosphere, discussed their research and received impulses for their further academic careers.

The GI_Forum is jointly organized by the University of Salzburg Interfaculty Department for Geoinformatics – Z_GIS, the Commission for GIScience at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW-GIScience), and the Department of Sustainable Tourism and Regional Development at the German University of Technology in Muscat, Oman. The interdisciplinary GI_Forum has become an annual event for a vibrant GI community representing academia, industry, government, and education to advance the dialogue on progress in GIScience and to explore new research directions. The symposium is co-located with the highly regarded annual German language AGIT conference (www.agit.at).

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