2008 GIS Symposium: Sustaining the Future & Understanding the Past

REGISTRATION is now CLOSED. Thank you for your interest in the 2008 GIS Symposium.

Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University will be hosting the biennial GIS Symposium: Sustaining the Future & Understanding the Past on Thursday, April 3, 2008. On this website you can view the program, titles, abstracts and biographies of each presenter. The Symposium has a limited registration and is by invitation only - registration is now closed.

General Symposium Theme:

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide ideal platforms for the convergence of disease-specific information and analyses in relation to the natural environment, global human health and public policy. Climate change and biodiversity loss, from genes to ecosystems, may play a role in disease emergence and transmission. A holistic approach to global human health taking into account environmental factors is required for public health safety in the 21st century.

Based on an integrated environmental understanding, various projects requiring international collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches to the compilation, monitoring, management, re-use, and curation of data are underway. The goal of these projects is open data access and decision support tool development to be used across a multiplicity of science communities.

Framing the symposium is a discussion by Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), talking about  new approaches to research enabled by cyberinfrastructure with an emphasis on data reuse and data curation.