GI_Forum 2016, the 10th annual conference along with its sister conference, AGIT and the German branch of FOSSGIS, was held at the University of Salzburg, Austria. It was organized by the Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics – Z_GIS of the University of Salzburg, and GIScience Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. 1200 participants from 36 countries benefited from a variety of topics covered across 56 technical sessions, 20 workshops and 13 special fora linking into the conference slogan “open:spatial:interfaces”. To name just a few, Integrated Assessment of Risk and Vulnerability was discussed for a full day, as have been Spatial Perspectives on Transportation Systems, GI-Curriculum Design 2.0 and Education. This event continues to be a rich blend of different people with different experiences, which makes it a highly productive and inspiring conference.
The keynotes, invited speeches and the panel discussion focused on interrelated themes of big data, open data, open source software and their standards, and data science, education for spatial thinking and spatial citizenship. Keynotes included Harvey Miller (Ohio State University, USA), Katharyne Mitchell (University of Washington, USA) and Anita Graser (Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria). Keynote speakers were also available at the Young Researchers’ Corner for Bachelor, MSc and PhD students for more intimate discussions related to research practice and projects, career planning and opportunities for academic exchange in line with the conference policy of providing special care for young researchers.
This year best student paper presented at the conference was awarded to Mario Dolancic from the University of Salzburg for his paper “Automatic Lane Level Road Network Graph Generation from Floating Car Data”. Erik Jakobi und Inga Gryl from University of Duisburg-Essen received the best poster award <Poster Title>?. In house social events as well as the AGIT EXPO and hands-on workshops provided a full overview of both GIScience and GI-industry and led to the development of new and dissemination of current R&D initiatives.
