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GEOINFORMATIKA.SK

GISportal.cz

geocommunity.eu

Vision

The symposium GIS Ostrava 2013 follows one main topic – Geoinformatics for City Transformations.

Current cities face many challanges. Cities are significantly influenced by various global, national and regional forces including changes of the society from industrial to post-industrial, massive migration waves, environmental pressures, changes of political system, high unemployment, economical and technological changes, changes of threats, expanding internal horizontal and vertical divergences, crime, radicalisms and other social problems which are often intensifying. Some of these challenges were exposed as Europe's structural weaknesses based on the strategy Europe 2020. Cities must act to adapt to these movements and to maintain their position. Various transformations of cities require efficient methods and tools. Geoinformatics play a substantial role in monitoring, querying, annotating, modelling, simulations, visualizations and decision making. Progress of geoinformatics allows us to study problems and issues of cities which were impossible to deal with only a few years or decades ago. It helps to regulate developing strategies of cities towards smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. To fulfil this strategy, the perception of reality must change from macro or mezzo to micro spatial level, from broad zonal schema of cities to more detail street-level situation. This spatial shift is connected mainly with exploitation of new data sources providing high resolution data describing socioeconomic objects or processes (which needs to be properly georeferenced by buildings, address points or directly by geographical coordinates and stored often in large spatial databases). Traditional nadir imagery are substituted by oblique imagery, coupled with radar and laser scanning. Other challenges are connected with urban data consistency and conflation issues, ontology and urban data models or spatial aggregation and ecological fallacy. A new visualisation utilizes 3D urban artefacts generated automatically from imagery or point clouds, integrates capabilities of 3D portraying and creates a complex virtual reality of the city environment. The variety of data sources (including almost real-time data streams) enable monitoring and modelling of city dynamics with a full range of focuses including large scale transport movements, everyday tracking of community groups or monitor individual anonymous activities. The increased focus to the street-level mapping motivates changes in perception of a physical space of cities leading to higher preferences of road and pedestrian distances than the Euclidean ones. The geoinformatics support an inclusivity of growth by new possibilities how to measure, classify and interpret mutual influences of social and physical environments in the city. It also offers more complex and detail quantitative evaluation of the urban development. The use of micro-data and proper methods allows to find and monitor areas in cities which can be problematic from various aspects (unemployment, poverty, crime, education etc.) and subsequently target precautions to increase their competitiveness and inclusivity. Last but not least all of these technological and methodical movements have to be applied in conjunction with the full respect to privacy and other ethical or legal issues.

The aim of the conference is to present and discuss new methods, issues and challenges of the geoinformatics encountered in various parts of the cities transformations and how can urban geographers and city planners exploit all achievements in geoinformatics to face the current and future needs of cities.

History

The history of prior years of the conference GIS…Ostrava is available here.