Workshop at COSIT 2009, Aber Wrac'h, France, September 21st, 2009

 

The proceedings are available online at the University of Melbourne e-Prints Repository.

!! Call for papers for a Special Issue in the new Journal of Spatial Information Science on the workshop topic !!

Workshop Description

In recent years, the availability of automatically generated spatial information of various kinds has developed dramatically. Nowadays, virtually any kind of information is obtainable via the internet. Route descriptions of diverse kinds can be obtained from many different sources and across different modalities. Views of maps and geographic information can be accessed in various ways, and local spatial or spatial-related information is provided for diverse interests and in a multitude of ways.

Although this is already a fantastic situation in terms of information availability and accessibility, internet users may not always be comfortable with the ways in which the information is presented. Recent research has shown that automatically generated information exhibits fundamentally different features from information provided naturally by humans when asked about spatial information, for example, in route directions ( Tenbrink & Winter, 2009, Spatial Cognition & Computation). Therefore, it is our contention that substantial work still needs to be done in order to render spatial information services much more supportive and cognitively suitable.

The focus of this workshop will be on issues pertaining to granularity, relevance, and integration. Spatial information is presented to information seekers on various levels of granularity, ranging from coarse high-level information concerning geographic areas to detailed low-level information concerning spatial actions in small-scale space. Not all of this information is relevant for all purposes, and so decisions concerning granularity are directly intertwined with issues of relevance across interaction scenarios. On top of that, web-based services typically present information on one level of granularity at a time, providing access to other granularities or other types of information via various hyperlinks. In contrast, humans manage to present information in an integrated and coherent way, switching flexibly and smoothly between levels of granularity according to the expected relevance for the information seeker. Such processes are substantially supported by dialogic interaction.

In this workshop, we wish to bring together researchers concerned with the integrated and flexible presentation of spatial information both by systems and by humans, addressing the issue from a range of different viewpoints, including at least the following:

• How can diverse kinds of spatial information be integrated more flexibly and smoothly in automatic presentation?

• What kinds of features do human spatial descriptions of various kinds exhibit with respect to granularity, relevance, and integration?

• How can issues of relevance be operationalized? Can findings on relevance in linguistics – in particular concerning spatial information – be transferred meaningfully to computational issues?

• How do spatial interaction scenarios (of any kind – between humans or in human-system interaction) differ with respect to requirements of granularity and integration?

• Can we think of multi-granular cartographic or sketch representations that capture relevance and integration?

• How can a multi-granular presentation be specified and generated on the fly? Do adaptive functions do this service, how do they work for different user groups, roles, tasks or capabilities?

• How can automatic dialogue systems be designed in order to support the selection of relevant information on flexible levels of granularity?

• Empirical findings concerning human (spatial) information processing with respect to granularity and integration

• Empirical findings concerning variability across wayfinding and spatial acquisition scenarios, highlighting cognitive processes with respect to relevance

• Empirical findings concerning human spatial dialogue, related to the topic of the workshop. 

Contributions

 

Short (12-page) papers should be sent by email as a pdf to Thora Tenbrink <tenbrink*at*uni-bremen.de>, using the Springer LNCS format as for main COSIT conference paper submissions. The workshop submissions will be peer-reviewed carefully by members of the Review Committee as listed below.

Digital proceedings will contain accepted and satisfactorily revised full papers. Authors of these contributions will present their work in a talk. Papers accepted as posters will appear in the proceedings as one-page abstract; the authors will present their work in a poster session. Registration of at least one author is a prerequisite for final poster or paper acceptance / publication.

Subsequent to the workshop, selected revised and extended paper contributions will be considered for further publication in an edited collection or a special issue for a journal, aiming for a reasonable account of the state of the art in this area based on the emerging conclusions developed jointly in the workshop.

 

Invited Speaker

Dr. Sabine Timpf, Professor for Geoinformatics, University of Augsburg

Expert in Geographic Information Science, Spatial Modelling, and Navigation

 

Participation

Participants will be encouraged to attend the full workshop (September 21, 9am to 6pm) rather than individual talks. Talks will be arranged in subareas with ample time for intermediate discussions.

Registrations for the workshop will be part of the COSIT registration process. Registration fees will cover the full day, including lunch, dinner and coffee-breaks.

 

Important Dates

May 31, 2009	Full paper submission (12 pages)
June 10, 2009	Preliminary notification of acceptance at least as poster
June 15, 2009	Early bird registration (COSIT conference and workshops)
July 15, 2009	Notification of acceptance (details)
August 31, 2009	Revised papers due
September 21, 2009	Workshop date
September 21-25, 2009	COSIT conference

 

Organizers

 

Thora Tenbrink (primary contact), SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition, U Bremen, Germany

email:     tenbrink*at*uni-bremen.de

Stephan Winter, ISPRS WGII/1, Department of Geomatics, U Melbourne, Australia

email:     winter*at*unimelb.edu.au

 

Review Committee

Lawrence Cavedon, Australia 
Kenny Coventry, UK
Michel Denis, France
Sara Fabrikant, Switzerland
Andrew Frank, Austria
Georg Gartner, Wien
Stephen Hirtle, USA
Christoph Hölscher, Germany
Alexander Klippel, USA
Alfons Maes, The Netherlands
Dan Montello, USA
Martin Raubal, USA
Kai-Florian Richter, Germany
Inessa Seifert, Germany
Monika Sester, Germany
Sabine Timpf, Germany
Martin Tomko, Switzerland
Robert Weibel, Switzerland