Prof. Hanan Samet, SFI Walton Fellow at the National Centre for Geocomputation, NUI Maynooth & Computer Science Department, University of Maryland will present a Public Lecture on Thurs. evening., July 2nd 2009 in the Hume Building, North Campus, NUI Maynooth entitled:
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION: CASTING A WIDE NET ON GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS) The lecture is preceded by a cheese and wine reception at 6pm in the Board Room of the John Hume Building with the lecture itself taking place at 6.30pm in Hume Lecture Theatre 4. All welcome. RSVP to '[email protected]' by June 30th appreciated. Abstract The popularity of web-based mapping services such as Google Earth/Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth (Bing), has led to an increasing awareness of the importance of spatial data and its incorporation into both web-based search and the databases that support it, whereas in the past attention to spatial data had been primarily limited to geographic information systems (GIS). An immediate byproduct of this awareness is the expectation of a real time response as is the experience of users of spreadsheets. Spatial data is distinguished from conventional data by having extent, which means that rather than being limited to locations, it also includes collections of locations [and, most importantly in both cases, their attributes]. Having extent is challenging in several respects. First, it is not easy to order such data which impacts the ability to retrieve it quickly. Second, the specification of the data is both vague and ambiguous by virtue of the amount of precision that is needed to make it useful. The ambiguity is very clear when one considers that a location as well as a collection of locations can be specified either or both geometrically via, for example, its centroid or its boundary, and verbally via the name that is used to refer to it. The latter is both aided and complicated by the possible need to make use of knowledge, whether implicit or explicit, of the information that is inherent in its container hierarchy. In this lecture we explore how these issues are manifested and resolved, both conceptually, and via demonstrations of real systems, thereby demonstrating how wide a net has been cast on geographic information systems by today’s applications. About Hanan Hanan Samet (www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park and a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Walton Fellow at the National Centre for Geocomputation, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His research interests include data structures, computer graphics, geographic information systems, computer vision, robotics, and database management systems and he is the author of over 300 publications on these topics. He was recently presented with the 2009 UCGIS Research Award. He is the author of the several books including most recently: "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/multidimensional-book-flyer.pdf), an award winner in the 2006 best book in Computer and Information Science competition of the Professional and Scholarly Publishers (PSP) Group of the American Publishers Association (AAP), and of the first two books on spatial data structures titled "Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures", and "Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing, and GIS". _______________________________________________ Talk-ie mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ie
