In May of this year, CGIS Professor Grant McKenzie attended AGILE 2017, the 20th annual international conference on Geographic Information Science put together by the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe. This year’s theme was Societal Geo-Innovation and took place at the University of Wageningen in The Netherlands. Wageningen is a historic town in the center of the Netherlands, 1.5 hours by train southeast of Amsterdam, on the north bank of the Nederrijn river. The University and Research Centre is a top Dutch research institution focused primarily on life and social sciences and has one of the leading Geoinformatics programs in Europe. Dr. McKenzie was invited to presented his research paper on the “Effect of Regional Variation and Resolution on Geosocial Thematic Signatures for Points of Interest” co-authored with Krzysztof Janowicz from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The conference kicked off the first day with workshops ranging in topics from Volunteered Geographic Information to geo-gamification and spatial semantics. This was followed by a well attended ESRI icebreaker and welcome reception at the Hotel de Wereld, the capitulation site of the German troops in the Netherlands on May 5, 1945. The main portion of the conference ran for 3 days, hosting 66 presenters (full papers, short papers and posters) and over 300 participants. Highlights of the conference included work by Zhu et al. on generalizing the geo-dipole for quantifying spatial patterns in geographic field and Knoth et al.’s work on user-generated 3D building maps.
From a social perspective, AGILE included a number of notable networking events including a Ferry to Ferry bicycle excursion through the Dutch countryside and the conference Gala dinner. The dinner involved a walking tour of the historic city center with courses served at various restaurants along the walk. All-in-all an excellent send off to a productive and informative geoinformatics conference. More information on the conference can be found at https://agile-online.org/index.php/conference/conference-2017.
