UCGIS Summer Assembly

On June 23, Steve and I were keynote speakers at the Summer Assembly of the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), which was quite an honor. I quote UCGIS in my dissertation (page 13 of part I):

“As the variety of geospatial information and data resources

increases each year, the demand for understanding and building

sustainable information and knowledge structures remains a critical

research challenge for the geo-spatial information community.”

Given that the quote comes from the 2003 research priorities, it is interesting that the GIS community still has not converged on sustainable information infrastructures, despite lots of efforts in that direction, including a contribution that Joe Ferreira and I made a couple of years ago and an earlier one I published with Lorlene Hoyt in 2006.

Appropriately, the core of the presentation that Steve and I made revolved around Autonomous Urban Agents, a concept that I have bloogged about before and has been partially implemented in the Municipal Data Objects, which have also been discussed herein in recent months. I happen to think that attaching agents to municipal objects, combined with the issuance of an official birth certificate, as we have begun to do in the UK, promises to be a revolutionarily simple, yet powerful solution to the big spatial infrastructure debate.

I am sure that there will be some major developments on this front in the next 12 months. Most of them from Santa Fe...

Keep your eyes peeled!