There was a lot of buzz about cityscapes at ESRI this year, but the place that will really focus on this topic will be GeoWeb 2009 in Vancouver, starting Monday, July 27th.
According to Galdos Systems CEO and GeoWeb organizer Ron Lake, last year they started the idea of cityscapes with a focus on CAD and GIS integration.
“This year we’re focused more on SDI and data sharing in urban environments,” said Lake. “To do that, we have invited speakers like Ken Greenberg, an urban planner for the City of Toronto, a well known architect, talk about collaboration and building cities.”
In that context, information sharing involves the collaboration of both machines and people. “We also have speaker David Bolocker, CTO at IBM, who will talk about collaboration software research that IBM has been doing,” said Lake. “Then we have John Stutz, co-founder of Tellus Institute of Boston, an organization that does scenario planning, which in their case involves numerical modeling of global processes – population, climate, and potential scenarios for the evolution of the earth. They also did a big study for the city of Boston.”
Javier de la Torre, CEO at Vizzuality, Madrid, Spain, will speak on his project called the Encyclopedia of Life, which endeavors to catalog location, time and extent of every species, incident, and all biologists’ or others’ reports on the presence of an animal or plant species.
This year the conference also includes an Academic Science track. Some of the papers from the conference will be published in the ISPRS Journal.
The conference includes an all-day course entitled GeoWeb 101 which will answer questions such as, why does GML exist, or what is the difference between GML and KML?