[OSM-talk-ie] Public lecture on GIS, Maynooth, Thurs July 2nd

[Christian van den Bosch]

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 'ncg at nuim.ie' 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".