GCRO represented at the GI_Forum in Salzburg

GI_Forum is an annual conference, held in the beautiful city of Salzburg, Austria, which aims to provide a platform for dialogue among technologists and critical thinkers, GIScientists and educationalists in a continuing effort to support the creation of an informed GISociety (www.gi-forum.org). This year’s conference, held from 1-4 July with the theme Geospatial Innovation for Society, was attended by Chris Wray. The main keynote was presented by Andrè Skupin from San Diego State University, discussing “A world beyond networks: geographic approaches to knowledge visualization”. Other hot topics included: linked open data; analysing travel patterns from georeferenced tweets; and the development of new methods of creating homogeneous spatial reporting units independent of artificial administrative boundaries, referred to as integrated geons.

GCRO’s poster, “Creating policy debates through data visualisations and GIS mapping in the Gauteng City-Region, South Africa”, authored by Chris Wray, Daniel Kibirige and Guy Trangoš, was presented at the conference’s evening poster session on 2nd July. The poster describes how within the GCRO, GIS is utilised beyond a descriptive mapping or support role, by also leading and defining a number of research projects as an analytic tool. This is illustrated in the poster through a series of maps of the month focusing on spatial change, with examples of the latest vignettes also provided. The poster is available for download on the published works page.

View from the Salzburg conference venue

Salzburg sunset

GCRO's poster