This is the seventh conference of a highly successful series that began in 2000. The series typically attracts over 300 world-wide attendees. GIScience brings together leading researchers from all disciplines to reflect the wide spectrum of scientific research areas such as cognitive science, computer science, engineering, geography, information science, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, social science, environmental sciences, and statistics.

The conference has a tradition of focusing on basic research findings across all sectors of the field, and pure application papers were discouraged. The conference has two refereed paper tracks: full papers and extended abstracts. In addition, the conference also includes a variety of workshops and tutorials that cover many cutting-edge topics in related fields of GIScience.