Geospatial thinking

Abstract

For the fourth consecutive year, the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories for Europe (AGILE) promoted the edition of a book with the collection of the scientific papers that were submitted as full-papers to the AGILE annual international conference. Those papers went through a competitive review process. The 13th AGILE conference call for full-papers of original and unpublished fundamental scientific research resulted in 54 submissions, of which 21 were accepted for publication in this volume (acceptance rate of 39%). Published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, this book is associated to the 13th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, held in 2010 in Guimarães, Portugal, under the title “Geospatial Thinking”. The efficient use of geospatial information and related technologies assumes the knowledge of concepts that are fundamental components of Geospatial Thinking, which is built on reasoning processes, spatial conceptualizations, and representation methods. Geospatial Thinking is associated with a set of cognitive skills consisting of several forms of knowledge and cognitive operators used to transform, combine or, in any other way, act on that same knowledge. The scientific papers published in this volume cover an important set of topics within Geoinformation Science, including: Representation and Visualisation of Geographic Phenomena; Spatiotemporal Data Analysis; Geo-Collaboration, Participation, and Decision Support; Semantics of Geoinformation and Knowledge Discovery; Spatiotemporal Modelling and Reasoning; and Web Services, Geospatial Systems and Real-time Applications. The organization of this annual conference, either in its scientific and its organizing component, was only possible with the support of a large number of individuals and institutions. We therefore would like to gratefully acknowledge the effort of the authors and reviewers of this book, who made this edition possible in a short schedule. We thank the local organizing chair Adriano Moreira (University of Minho) and his team for giving all local support. We would also like to acknowledge Filipe Meneses (University of Minho) for his great support in the edition of this book and Agata Oelschläger (Springer) who also helped us to publish this book on time. Additionally, we would like to thank ESRI Inc. and the Nordic Network in Geographic Information Science for sponsoring the 13th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science.