Foreword

 

We are delighted to be able to introduce this online volume of extended abstracts for GIScience 2010. It brings together almost a hundred extended abstracts which showcase the very best of our discipline in 2010. To reach this volume, all of these extended abstracts were reviewed by 3 members of the Programme Committee, who recommended either poster or paper presentation. These two modes of presentation were designed to allow different sorts of material to be presented in the best possible style. To this end as well as four parallel oral tracks, which also contained full papers published in a separate Springer volume (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 6292), GIScience 2010 had two plenary poster sessions.

The final decision on acceptance was made by the Programme Chairs, and this is a good point to thank our colleagues for their help in this task: Sara Fabrikant, Tumasch Reichenbacher, Christoph Schlieder and Marc van Kreveld. All of the Programme Chairs met in Zurich to consider each and every paper individually, on the basis of both the Programme Committee's reviews and a detailed discussion. Out of a total of 147 submissions, 96 accepted extended abstracts are published in this volume.

Of course, like all editors, lots of people have helped us put this volume together. The Programme Committee Members and some additional reviewers delivered timely and constructive reviews, making our job in decision making much easier. Curdin Derungs and Martin Tomko nagged authors and edited papers to make sure that the volume looked as homogeneous, and thus as high quality, as possible. Stefano De Sabbata and Pia Bereuter helped to bring together the online proceedings.

However, all of this help would have been pointless if the GIScience community hadn't submitted extended abstracts to this volume. The biggest thanks by far must go to them, for choosing GIScience as a venue to present their research, and through the quality of their work making sure that it remains a premier conference in our field.

Ross Purves and Robert Weibel

Zurich, 4th September, 2010