First Web-GIS Conference: Concerns and Prospects

16 December 2009, 12:13pm

On December 3 the conference “Web & GIS 2009” was held for the first time in Russia. The event took place within the framework of the 4th International Conference “Earth from Space – the Most Effective Solutions” and gathered around 200 participants – specialists of two IT disciplines: Internet and Geoinformatics.

Web-cartography integrates the technologies and in fact represents the area of common interest for GIS folks and Internet folks; however the two communities so far have missed their own information forum to run a dialog. “Web & GIS 2009” became the first forum of the kind.

A series of master classes were given before plenary presentations started, introducing web-cartographic technologies as an alternative to the traditional GIS, and web-services for accessing global geodata archives as an extra opportunity for common utilization with geodata stored in local archives. The plenary section gave the floor to representatives of “DoublGIS”, Google (Russia), Yandex, «Data+», Regio (Estonia), Advanced Flash Components (USA) companies, GIS-Lab and OpenStreetMap communities, Wikimapia.org Internet project, etc. Presentations are available at the mini-conference website.

In developing agenda of “Web & GIS 2009” mini-conference the organizers proceeded from the topics being common for both disciplines, which were summarized at the Round Table “State, Commercial and User Approaches to Geodata Dissemination on the Internet”. The discussion indicated that there are concerns shared by both disciplines: up-to-date and quality geodata; legal issues; monetization of geodata (maps and satellite images) in web-services; standards for geodata usage, etc. It appeared in the course of the discussion that it’s still difficult to find a common language understood by GIS specialists and web-cartographers. This problem is reflected in variety of technological opinions and in difficulties encountered in the process of finding joint design solutions. Therefore, holding this interdisciplinary conference is a well justified task.

The organizers — ScanEx and Yandex are in the process of discussing potentials for holding “Web & GIS” on a yearly basis”.

ScanEx

Geo: International