FOSS4G 2009 Call4papers

Aims and scope
The FOSS4G 2009 academic track aims at bringing together researchers, developers, users and practitioners carrying out research and development in the geospatial and the free and open source fields and willing to share original and recent research developments and experiences.

The academic track will act as an inventory of current research topics, but the major goal is to promote cooperative research between OSGeo developers and the academia. The academic track is the right forum to highlight the most important research challenges and trends in the domain, and let them became the basis for an informal OSGeo research agenda. It will foster interdisciplinary discussions in all aspects of the geospatial and free and open source domains. It will be organized in a way to promote networking between the participants, to initiate and favour discussions regarding cutting-edge technologies in the field, to exchange research ideas and to promote international collaboration.

Topics of interest
We invite submissions that address theoretical, technical, and practical topics of related to geospatial free and open source domain. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to the following:


 * State of the Art developments in Open Source GIS
 * Open Source GIS in Education
 * Open architectures, open content, open specifications
 * Interoperability and standards - OGC, ISO/TC 211
 * Metadata, Spatial Data Infrastructures and Service Oriented Architectures
 * Geospatial databases and data warehouses with free and open source software
 * Maintenance and evolution of databases and data warehouses
 * Active/Real-Time databases and data warehouses
 * Free and open source WebMapping and WebGIS
 * Free and Open Source GIS application use cases : Government, Participatory GIS, Location based services, Health, Energy, Water, Urban and Environmental Planning, Climate change, etc.
 * Web processing services
 * Case studies of free and open source implementations
 * Free and Open Source GIS Internationalisation and Localisation
 * Using Open Source GIS with proprietary software
 * Transition to Free and Open Source GIS
 * Free and Open Source GIS business models
 * Free and Open Source GIS implementation and deployment case studies
 * Databases and multidimensional modeling and queries: languages, optimization, processing
 * Spatial OLAP and geo-analytical technologies
 * Data mining and geospatial search engines
 * Frameworks for Business Process Management (BPM), Business Intelligence (BI)
 * Data visualization, visual languages and querying
 * Sensor Web enablement
 * Quality assessment
 * Analysis, testing, performance tuning and benchmarking
 * Cartography and advanced styling
 * Earth Observation and remote sensing
 * Geospatial semantics aspects: semantics and ontology
 * Spatial and Spatio-temporal data, analysis and integration
 * Sustainable Development and Governance
 * Security and privacy issues
 * Mobile objects and trajectories analyses
 * Mobile and context aware applications
 * Personalization and user requirements analysis
 * Geospatial techniques and applications for mobile and wireless environments

Important dates

 * 1) ''Paper abstracts due: 8 June 2009
 * 2) Full papers due: 15 July 2009
 * 3) Notification of acceptance: August 15, 2009
 * 4) Registration: August 22, 2009
 * 5) Final paper version due: August 31, 2009
 * 6) Conference, workshops and track: October 20-23, 2009

Questions & notes: Do we plan to have the proceedings 1) ready for the conference or 2) to be published after the conference? If option 2), we can postpone the  deadlines. Are the authors required to submit an abstract on June 1st through the FOSS4G 2009 online system? I think this 1st deadline would be too short ... but   the submission of abstracts will help us to know how many people are interested to participate to the academic track. Can we consider a later deadline for abstract   submission, e.g. July 01, 2009? In many conferences, registration to the conference is mandatory so that an author has his/her paper published in the proceedings.   Do we require from all authors to be registered before we include the paper in the track programme and proceedings?

Submission guidelines
All submissions to the academic track must be original unpublished work written in English that is currently not under review elsewhere. Papers should not exceed the 6000 words limit. Authors must submit full papers according to the Springer formatting guidelines. Manuscripts not submitted in the provided style or having more than 6000 words will not be reviewed and thus will be automatically rejected.

The templates (Latex or Word template) for preparing full papers can be downloaded here:


 * Download the Word template
 * Download the Latex template

Nevertheless, full papers must be submitted in PDF file format! In addition, in order to allow a blind peer review process, authors names and affiliations must be provided on a separate page.

The submitted papers will be thoroughly reviewed by two to three members of the international scientific committee and refereed for their quality, originality and relevance. The proceedings are expected to be published by a reputed editor as a new issue of a wellknown book series or as a special issue of a journal. The scientific committee of the academic track is currently investigating different options. As soon as we get an agreement, we will announce the selected publication.

Submission to the track will be electronically only. Authors are asked to submit an abstract first (up to 500 words) in PDF file format and including authors name and affiliations. Please send the abstract by email to the track chairs with "FOSS4G 2009 academic track: abstract submission" as subject.

Submissions of full papers (in PDF file format) will have to be performed through a web submission system. URL will be provided shortly.

Supporting organizations
In addition to the OSGeo Foundation, the following organisations are proud to support and help in the organisation of the track:


 * ICA working group on open source geospatial technologies

Track chairs

 * [mailto:jgr@di.uminho.pt Jorge Gustavo Rocha] (Univ. Minho, Portugal)
 * [mailto:Thierry.Badard@scg.ulaval.ca Thierry Badard] (Laval Univ., Canada)

Scientific Committee
Invitations are being sent to reputed researchers (to be added soon as they acknowledge), but we also need volunteers already familiar with the peer review process. If you are interested in participating to the scientific committee, please let us know your intention by sending an email to the FOSS4G 2009 academic track (see the previous section).

Right now, the scientific committee is composed of:


 * Jorge Gustavo Rocha (Univ. Minho, Portugal)
 * Thierry Badard (Laval Univ., Canada)
 * Venkatesh Raghavan (Osaka City Univ., Japan)
 * Maria Antonia Brovelli (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)

To be completed.