COSIT_BPN_2019: Beyond Place Names: Current Capabilities, Limitations, and Future Directions in Place- Based Search University of Regensburg Regensburg, Germany, September 10, 2019 |
Conference website | http://spatial.ucsb.edu/COSIT-BPN-2019 |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cosit-bpn-2019 |
Submission deadline | June 24, 2019 |
COSIT 2019 Workshop on Beyond Place Names: Current Capabilities, Limitations, and Future Directions in Place-Based Search
Call for Papers
Please submit a 2-3 page paper on either current research or a position on future directions of place-based search by 10 June, 2019 to this COSIT_BPN_2019 EasyChair call. Example topics may include fuzzy or local gazetteers, non-geometric place representations, place-based querying and ranking, linguistic and contextual approaches, and evaluation methods for place-based search. All submissions must discuss how at least one search tool created or studied interprets and/or represents place. Submissions will be reviewed by the organizers for topical fit and innovativeness. If the papers contain enough novel material and the discussions suggest further development after the workshop, a call for full papers to a special journal issue will follow.
Stay tuned for publication options for accepted papers.
Important Dates
- Workshop short papers due: 10 June, 2019 (AoE, i.e., UTC-12)
- Notification of acceptance and workshop duration: 20 June, 2019
- Camera-ready papers due: 10 July, 2019
- Workshop date: 10 September, 2019
Submission: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cosit-bpn-2019
Webpage: http://spatial.ucsb.edu/COSIT-BPN-2019
Program
The workshop is meant to attract participants with backgrounds in psychology, linguistics, computer science, information systems, geography, engineering, architecture, and more. The organizers will set the stage from cognitive and computational perspectives, followed by participant lightning talks (5-7 minutes each) and extensive discussions of topics emerging from the position papers. Our goal is to make this a full day workshop, but this depends on the quantity and quality of submissions. In addition to several hands-on activities and group discussions, participants will be given 5-7 minutes each (plus time for questions and answers) to present their submitted short papers. Please see the detailed program on the workshop webpage for further details.
Description
Currently, many search tools allow users to tailor results to a locality by specifying a place name or exploring a map. But how exactly do these tools interpret a place name, and do these interpretations capture an adequate representation of places? How valuable are these tools in their present form for place-based search? This workshop will investigate these questions and advance discussion on two topics: the current theoretical and technical limitations of place-based search and the limitations that can be addressed in the next few years. Place is a much discussed topic in the spatial information theory community, so emphasis at this workshop will be on how search tools in particular can, should, and do handle place references.
Place-based search plateaued with the maturation of web mapping and location- based services and has since remained relatively undeveloped. In most text-based search tools, place names are handled, at best, as links to some geometric footprint stored in a gazetteer, which can then be used to query nearby, contained, or overlapping results. Other aspects of place, such as their enabling of events, people’s sense of place, and even variable interpretations of where places are remain outside current capacities of place-based search tools. Relevant work on place-based search can be found in contexts such as Digital Earths (e.g., Gore 1998), Digital Libraries (e.g., Lafia et al. 2016), Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR, e.g., the SPIRIT project (Jones et al. 2002)). However, place-based search is more specific than GIR, focusing on how place name interpretations influence search results. Many search tools in these and other contexts provide some form of geobrowsing, i.e., map-based search.
Organizers
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Thomas Hervey, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara - thomas.hervey@geog.ucsb.edu
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Werner Kuhn, Center for Spatial Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara – kuhn@spatial.ucsb.edu
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Stephan Winter, Department of Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne - winter@unimelb.edu.au
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Ross Purves, Department of Geography, University of Zurich - ross.purves@geog.uzh.ch