National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

Download this index for direct linked access to reports and position papers associated with NCGIA hosted and sponsored specialist research meetings and conferences between 1988 and 2008.

Marking the beginning of National Science Foundation funding for the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) at its three sites, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University at Buffalo, and the University of Maine, December 1, 2008 represented the twentieth anniversary of NCGIA. In honor of this occasion, a symposium was held at which retrospective and prospective analyses of the work of NCGIA were reviewed. Of special interest are the alternative perspectives on the ten most significant discoveries and innovations in GIScience and on the role of NCGIA over the twenty year span beginning in 1988.

Two research communities have developed more-or-less independently: the community of agent-based modelers of spatial systems on the one hand, and the community interested in the representational and computational aspects of complex dynamic systems on the other. As part of the joint US National Science Foundation / UK Economic and Social Research Council Special Activity in the Area of E-Science, the University of California, Santa Barbara and University College London organized a meeting to explore the linking of the agent modeling and dynamic systems research communities. The workshop  combined presentations with plenary and small-group  discussions. The pre-meeting position papers of parrticipants are available in this document

The two-and-a-half day workshop in Santa Barbara (December 2006) focused on the role of digital gazetteers in geo-referencing applications, starting with overviews of the state-of-the-art and current activities and leading to a consensus on the opportunities and directions for collaboration and the advancement of a research and practice agenda. The workshop was convened by the National Center for Geographic Information & Analysis (NCGIA) and the Redlands Institute, with sponsorship from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

The two-and-a-half day workshop (Dec 2006, in Santa Barbara CA) focused on the role of digital gazetteers in georeferencing applications, with overviews of the state-of-the-art and current activities and discussions on opportunities and directions for collaboration and the advancement of a research and practice agenda. The workshop was convened by the National Center for Geographic Information & Analysis (NCGIA) at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Redlands Institute. It was sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. This document contains the list of participants, submitted position papers, and the meeting agenda.

This specialist meeting (Dec. 2-4, 2004 in Santa Barbara, CA) focused on four sub-themes, each of which presents significant issues for interoperability and spatial webs:

• Syntactic interoperability, and the adequacy of current metadata standards;

• Semantic interoperability, and technologies for overcoming differences of meaning;

• Accuracy, and the ability of data sets of different accuracy to interoperate; and

• Spatial support, and technologies for re-sampling and interpolation.

The report summarizes discussions among expert participants, and provides access to presentations and position papers.

Discrete Global Grids: A Web Book (2002) was edited by Michael F. Goodchild and A. Jon Kimerling and produced with the support of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). This document reproduces the eight ‘chapters’ of the book, each of which deals with a specific aspect of discrete global grids as a method for specifying geographic location on the surface of the earth. The chapters are as follows:

Chapter 1: Developing an Equal Area Global Grid by Small Circle Subdivision, by Lian Song, A. Jon Kimerling and Kevin Sahr

Chapter Two: Interoperable Cooordinate Transformation and Identification of Coordinate Systems, by Daniel Specht

Chapter Three: Discovering, Modeling and Visualizing Global Grids over the Internet, by Yvan G. Leclerc, Martin Reddy, Lee Iverson and Michael Eriksen

Chapter Four: The Global Spatial Model, by Earl F. Burkholder

Chapter Five: EASE-Grid- A Versatile Set of Equal-Area Projections and Grids, by Mary J. Brodzik and Kenneth W. Knowles

Chapter Six: Ellipsoidal Area Computations of Large Terrestrial Objects, by Hrvoje Lukatela

Chapter Seven: A Seamless Global Terrain Model in the Hipparchus System, by Hrvoje Lukatela

Chapter Eight: Criteria and Measures for the Comparison of Global Geocoding Systems

This report describes a workshop held in January, 2001 in Santa Barbara, California. The workshop focused on landscape architecture, and brought together participants from both sides of this tension between the investigative and implementation disciplines, to explore its dimensions and to map directions for the future. Its central theme was landscape change, an area of concern to both investigators and practitioners.

Summaries of the four keynote presentations are provided as well as summaries of the subsequent plenary discussion on each of the four themes, and by summaries of each of the workshop’s breakout sessions. The final section provides a short summary of the workshop’s conclusions and ideas for follow-on actions. Appendix A provides the list of participants, and Appendix B presents an aggregated synthesis of the 80 research agenda suggestions provided by the participants during the workshop.

The National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) held a workshop in Santa Barbara from January 25-27, 2001. The workshop brought together representatives of the disciplines interested in landscape change, drawn from both the investigative sciences, such as geography, and the design disciplines, such as landscape architecture. Its purposes were to promote the building of a collaborative research community; to develop a joint research agenda; and to facilitate the exchange of ideas. It addressed its major objectives in the context of four themes: information technologies, decision making, landscape perception and assessment, and environmental and social sciences.

This document contains: the workshop proposal, position papers submitted by participants and the workshop agenda.

The ability to specify geographic location is fundamental to many areas of science and many human activities. In addition to latitude/longitude, horizontal/vertical datums and rectangular coordinate systems such as UTM, new approaches to tessellating planets -- often involving triangulations, some of which are hierarchical -- have been developed by researchers in a variety of domains to satisfy a range of scientific objectives. The International Conference on Discrete Global Grids, organized by the U.S. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) brought 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 conference was held in the Radisson Hotel on the Santa Barbara waterfront from March 26-28, 2000.

Participants were asked to submit position papers along with their application. This document contains: 1) The original conference announcement; 2) The participant list; 3) All submitted abstracts (and full position papers where applicable); and 4) The conference agenda.