International Conference on Discrete Global Grids

The U.S. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis is holding an international conference concerning discrete global grids.

The conference will be held in the Radisson Hotel on the Santa Barbara waterfront in California. It will begin with a reception and keynote presentation on Sunday evening March 26, and continue through Tuesday March 28, 2000.

The Santa Barbara site of the U.S. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis is organizing the conference by a steering committee chaired by Michael Goodchild (UCSB), and including Noel Cressie (Ohio State), Geoffrey Dutton (Spatial Effects), Nick Faust (Georgia Tech), Ralph Kahn (JPL), Tony Olsen (EPA), and Denis White (EPA).

This conference will bring researchers together from many different disciplines to share advances in the rapidly developing fields of discrete global grids, global coordinate systems, and global georeferencing, and their applications. The program will include keynote presentations, contributed papers, demonstrations, and informal discussions.

Many disciplines are interested in methods for gridding the curved surface of the Earth. They include:         

  • Statistics: sampling schemes and statistical models over the Earth's surface.
  • Geographic information systems and science: georeferencing, data structures and indexing schemes for global data, global visualization, and Digital Earth.
  • Remote sensing: consistent schemes for global imagery
  • Environmental modeling: finite difference and finite element schemes for solution of partial differential equations in global system modeling.
  • Digital libraries: methods to support search, assessment, and retrieval of global geospatial and georeferenced data from distributed servers.

Papers are invited that address any aspect of global grids. Suitable topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Interoperability of and with global grids; compatibility issues for different grid schemes, and global grids as a medium of exchange for geospatial data.
  • Data quality issues; what kinds of positional error and distortions do different schemes have, what are the consequences, and for whom and why do they matter.
  • Application of discrete global grid systems in survey designs for environmental and natural resources.
  • Alternative discrete global grid systems based on platonic polyhedra.         
  • Discrete global grids in atmospheric and ocean modeling.
  • Spatial analyses using hierarchical structures in discrete global grids.
  • Graphics and visualization based on discrete global grids.
  • Efficient addressing schemes for hierarchical discrete global grids.

Abstracts should be sent to globalgrids@ncgia.ucsb.edu before January 10, 2000. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 31. Registration and program information will be available at www.ncgia.ucsb.edu.