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 workshop aims to bring 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 will gain an early overview of a ubiquitously emerging topic: to approach and model place. The exchange at the workshop shall bring diverse developments into awareness, allow an early overview of the state of the art, and strengthen individual projects as well as the field as a whole.

Any researcher interested in presenting a paper is invited to submit a full paper of 3000-5000 words, which will be thoroughly reviewed by members of the international program committee. The workshop will be based on the oral presentation of carefully selected papers and other activities, such as a panel discussion. High-quality submissions will be accepted for presentation at the workshop. Manuscripts must describe original work that has not been published before nor is currently under review somewhere else. Papers must be written in English according to the Springer LNCS formatting guidelines, except the citations that should follow an author-year style. Papers must not have any author information or acknowledgements. Submissions should be made in PDF, and all figures and tables should be included in place. Submit to winter [at] unimelb.edu.au.

Note that the full registration of at least one of the authors of a paper will be a prerequisite for final acceptance of a paper.

The accepted and revised papers will be published in online proceedings prior to the workshop. Furthermore, paper authors will be 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. A special call will be sent out closer to the workshop.

Authors of papers on the workshop topic that were rejected at GIScience’08 are encouraged to revise their papers according to their reviews and to resubmit to this workshop.

Paper submission: 31 May 2008
Paper notification: 11 July 2008
Workshop: 23 September 2008

Extended call for submissions for a special journal issue: 1 September 2008
Paper submissions for the special journal issue: 31 December 2008

• 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