Place is a central concept in human spatial cognition and communication. It also serves as the prototypical spatial reference in human, economic and cultural geography. This workshop surveys the recent discovery of the topic of place in more formal and computational directions of research, among them location-based services, gaming, human computer interface design, ontology, robotics and localization, social networks, gazetteers and georeferencing, vernacular geography, tagging and text mining, geographic information retrieval, qualitative modeling of environments, modeling affordance, and modeling uncertainty.

This half-day workshop has brought together researchers working on the topic of place from different disciplines and viewpoints. Disciplines involved include geography, computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, psychology and linguistics. Participants gained an early overview of a ubiquitously emerging topic: to approach and model place. The exchange at the workshop brought diverse developments into awareness, allowed an early overview of the state of the art, and strengthened individual projects as well as the field as a whole.

An Evaluation of Kernel Density Estimation and Support Vector Machines for Automated Generation of Footprints for Imprecise Regions from Geotags
Christian Grothe and Jochen Schaab
(Technical University Darmstadt, Germany)

Characterizing Places in Geospatial Ontologies: Specifying Partial Knowledge about their Use
Sumit Sen (GIS Development Pvt Ltd)

An Experimental Ant Colony Approach for the Spatialization of Verbal Route Descriptions
David Brosset, Christophe Claramunt and Eric Saux
(Naval Academy Research Institute, France)

Photographing a City: An Analysis of Place Concepts Based on Spatial Choices
Christoph Schlieder and Christian Matyas
(University of Bamberg, Germany)

The proceedings are available online:

Winter, S.; Kuhn, W.; Krüger, A. (Eds.), 2008: International Workshop on
Computational Models of Place (PLACE’08). Department of Geomatics, The
University of Melbourne, Australia, 76+VI pp. Digital Repository of the
University of Melbourne, http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/2466.

Paper authors are invited to submit their workshop papers revised with the feedback received at the workshop for a special issue in Spatial Cognition and Computation, one of the top ranked international journals in Geographic Information Science. The call is open to anybody working in this field. Submission deadline: 31 December 2008.

The call for papers is available here.

• Pragya Agarwal, Geomatic Engineering, University College London, UK
• John Bateman, Applied English Linguistics, University of Bremen, Germany
• Susanne Boll, Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems, University of Oldenburg, Germany
• Christian Becker, Information Systems, Mannheim University, Germany
• Ruth Conroy Dalton, VR Centre for the Built Environment, University College London, UK
• Helen Couclelis, Geography, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA
• Alistair Edwardes, Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland
• Christopher Jones, Geographical Information Systems, Cardiff University, UK
• Christian Kray, Informatics Research Institute, Newcastle University, UK
• Jeff Malpas, Philosophy, University of Tasmania, Australia
• Ross Purves, Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland
• Carlo Ratti, Senseable City Lab, MIT, USA
• Jörg Roth, Computer Science, University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg, Germany
• Bernt Schiele, Multimodal Interactive Systems, TU Darmstadt, Germany
• Thomas Strang, Ubiquitous Services, University of Innsbruck, Austria, and DLR, Germany

• Stephan Winter, Geomatics, The University of Melbourne, Australia
• Werner Kuhn, Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany
• Antonio Krüger, Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany