Organized Conferences
Forty-nine representatives from the public sector, private sector, and academia joined twenty ADL staff from UCSB and Colorado for three days. The meeting iterated between plenary and small group discussion, software demonstrations, and informal discourse. The intention was that panel members continue to be proactive in the months following the workshop, through online activities (working with the Library testbed), through email contact (responding to surveys and other material that the Alexandria Team distributed), and by face-to-face meetings at national conferences.
Recommendations of the workshop include the following general comments, which are discussed in greater detail in the body of the report. First, the panel is supportive of the efforts of the research teams working at Santa Barbara and at Colorado. Second, the panel encourages implementation of the new interface design, and agrees that the existing Web interface was narrowly tailored to earth and space science researchers. Related to this was the nearly uniform consensus that one of the three target groups (K-12 students) be given a less prominent emphasis in the final year and a half of the project. A second issue voiced by the panelists and funding agency representatives related to keeping a careful balance between endeavors to produce an operational digital library testbed, and attention to theoretical and applied research. While some research requires an operational testbed, panelists felt that a fully functional digital library should not be seen as an important end in and of itself. Panelists stated that future workshops should devote more of the agenda to listening to panel comments, providing online access to the testbed, and working online at the meeting with participants.
SESSION: The Future of Geographic Information and Society
Panel session for GIS/LIS '97 Cincinnati, Ohio 28-30 October, 1997
Panel Organizers:
Michael Goodchild, U. California - Santa Barbara
Barbara P. Buttenfield, U. Colorado-Boulder
To service demands for geographic information, new data products appear on the Internet with increasing frequency. Data brokers create added-value products and data-intensive services for specialized applications ranging from rural health care to military strategic planning. Local governing organizations are increasingly able to generate their own data products for integration with other local agencies and for vertical integration as well. Access to geographic information drives these new products and services, and the coming years will demonstrate new classes of geographic information, new classes of service, and new classes of demand.
This panel presents four diverse viewpoints on the future of geographic information, focusing specifically on issues of acquisition, integration, and knowledge mining, with additional emphasis on societal and policy implications for the public, private and educational sectors. The panelists are drawn (respectively) from the software vending community, the strategic defense community, and from local government sectors, to present their vision about the future of geographic information and geographic information technology. This session is sponsored by the Mapping Science Committee, as part of ongoing discussions on the National Spatial Data Infrastructure and production, delivery and use of digital geospatial data in all sectors of the nation. The panel fits most of the conference topics, but probably fits best with Emerging Trends.