Special Session(s): Modeling Geographic Complexity.
DESCRIPTION:
Understanding geographical systems represents one of the greatest challenges of our time. Complexity has emerged as a useful paradigm to effectively study linked human, socioeconomic and biophysical systems at a variety of different spatial and temporal scales. As a result, descriptive and predictive models of various levels of sophistication and using mostly agents, genetic algorithms, cellular automata and neural networks are now beginning to regularly appear in the geographic literature. However, there still remains many unresolved conceptual, technical and application challenges associated with these complexity based models. The goal of this session is to focus on the following themes:
1. Conceptual: shared and unique complexity signatures in geographic systems; existing and emerging geographical and complexity theories; epistemological and ontological influences; complexity based model designs; networks and hybrid models; linking classical and spatial statistics in complexity studies.
2. Technical: space-time patterns and dynamics; standardizing the development and representation of complex systems; rule selection and implementation; multiple-scale interactions and structure, system evolution and self-organization; learning and adaptation; calibration, validation and verification; path-dependence; non-linearity.
3. Applications: effectiveness of complexity models when embedded in political, institutional and socio-economic systems; human-environment interactions; earth systems science; land use science; landscape ecology; sustainability analysis.
In order to widely disseminate the ideas emerging from this session, the organizers of the session are exploring the possibility for a special issue of a journal and /or an edited book so that authors will have the opportunity to suitably revise their presentations for publication. Priority will be given for work that has not been published, in review or in press.
Please e-mail the abstract and key words with your expression of intent to Andrew Crooks <acrooks2@gmu.edu> by October 19th, 2009.
Welcome to the new online home of the Royal Geographical Society’s GIScience Research Group. GIScience.org.uk contains information on the research group, it’s committee and how to join. We hope that the site will becoming a growing resource for the GIScience community. The Journals page is automatically updated by RSS feeds and contains the most recent articles from the major GIS and geography journals. The Links page is intended to point visitors to useful web resources dealing with GIScience and we welcome suggestions from members of the research group. GIScience.org.uk is also the place to promote and keep informed of forthcoming events within the RGS-IBG GIS and geography community. If you have any comments or suggestions regarding GIScience.org.uk please email James Cheshire.
We are pleased to invite you to attend the 18th annual GIS Research UK (GISRUK). This year the conference is being hosted at University College London (UCL), from Wednesday 14 to Friday 16 April 2010. We look forward to welcoming you to London for what we expect to be a very stimulating conference, covering areas of core geographic information science research as well as applications domains such as crime and health and technological developments in LBS and the geoweb.
UCL’s research mission as a global university is based around a series of Grand Challenges that affect us all, and these will be accommodated in GISRUK 2010. We are also, of course, a university based in London and so want to represent the challenges of a global city and the diversity of GI research problems the city poses.
Our overarching theme this year will therefore be “Global Challenges”. As is usual with GISRUK we welcome papers across the range of contemporary GIS research but we will particularly welcome papers in the following themes:
- Crime and Place
- Environmental Change
- Migration and Identity
- Intelligent Transport
- Public Health and Epidemiology
- Simulation and Modelling
- London as a global city
- The geoweb and neo-geography
- Open GIS and Volunteered Geographic Information
The Call for Papers is open and will close at the end of November 2009.
