Towards a place-based geographic information system

About

Towards a place-based geographic information system is the home of place-related research at the University of Melbourne, with partners world-wide. We study human place descriptions in order to enrich the human interaction with spatial technologies.

Place descriptions are a common way for people to describe a location, but no current software tools are smart enough to understand them. This way, emergency call centres are risking lives, postal services are wasting billions of dollars per year by addressing problems, and users of navigation or web services are frustrated about restrictive interfaces or prolonged search.

This research will develop novel, interdisciplinary approaches to automatically interpret human place descriptions. It will develop methods to capture placenames with their meaning – their true location – for smarter databases and automatic interpretation procedures. The acquired knowledge will be an important step forward for data custodians and for service users.

Contact us

Postal address

Department of Infrastructure Engineering
The University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010, Australia

Projects

Making human place knowledge digestible by computers: Designing a place-based GIS (DP170100109)

This project aims to deliver the fundamental computational methods to capture, model, process, and interact on human place knowledge. People understand their environment in a very different way to computers: They think of places and their relations, while computers use coordinates and maps. People’s interaction with maps is cognitively costly and error-prone, which is becoming untenable in contexts requiring time-critical decision making. The new fundamental computational methods will enable smart human-machine interaction that intuitively is based on place knowledge. The developed methods will be evaluated in scenarios such as general search, crowd-sourced data capture, or interaction with autonomous vehicles.

Talking about Place – Tapping Human Knowledge to Enrich National Spatial Data Sets (LP100200199) (2010–2014)

Supported by PSMA, ESTA, CGNA

Placename databases (gazetteers or address files) form an essential backbone of any national spatial data infrastructure. This project aims to enhance the content and functionality of such placename databases by tapping human knowledge. It will collect large corpora of geotagged human place descriptions, and interpret them to reveal the use of placenames, the spatial extent of places, and the relations between places. Results will support data custodians (our partners PSMA, CGNA) to enrich their databases, and critical users (our partner ESTA, Victoria’s ‘000’ operator) to provide better services. They will form an essential key for facilitating free dialogs about locations, eg, in emergency calls, in navigation, or in local web search.

Place descriptions are a common way for people to describe a location, but no current tools are smart enough to understand them. Emergency call centres are risking lives, address problems cost billions per year (USPS), and users of navigation or web services are frustrated. This project comes with a novel, interdisciplinary approach to automatically interpret human place descriptions. It will develop novel methods to capture placenames with their meaning for smarter databases and automatic interpretation procedures. The acquired knowledge will be an important step forward for Australia’s data custodians and for users. Australia’s location information industry will gain a significant advantage on a highly competitive global market.

Crowd-Sourcing Human Knowledge on Spatial Semantics of Place Names

Supported by Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES), 2010

Learning from the Crowds: A mobile location-based game engaged participants to ‘Tell us where they were’. People visited the game website from their mobile, confirmed where their phone had located them, and typed in a description of where they were – just how they would describe that place to a friend. Prizes were sent out for lucky participants.

We received by this game more than 2000 place descriptions. This information will be used as part of an academic research project that aims to discover how we talk about Melbourne, or any place in Victoria. These descriptions are now investigated to develop better web searching, mapping and navigation systems, and even emergency services.

People

Current researchers

Past industry partners

Past contributors

  • Matt Duckham
  • Abbas Rajabifard
  • Lawrence Cavedon
  • Lesley Stirling
  • Kai-Florian Richter
  • Daniela Richter
  • Johannes Trame
  • Emma Sun
  • Maria Purganan
  • Andrew Belegrinos
  • Guannan Li
  • Kjartan Bjorset
  • Igor Tytyk
  • Mahsa Ghasemi
  • Keith Chan
  • Harry Gaitanis
  • Marie Truelove
  • Nilofer Tambuwala
  • Junchul Kim
  • Farhad Laylavi
  • Fei Liu (Felix)
  • Peter Schinner
  • Qwaiimah Haji Sardani
  • Arbaz Khan
  • David Lin
  • Yuqi Wang
  • Andre Dittrich
  • Sha Zou
  • Alex Vedernikov
  • Sabine Timpf
  • Ping Guo

Publications

  • Chen, H.; Vasardani, M.; Winter, S.; Tomko, M. (2018): A Graph Database Model for Knowledge Extracted from Place Descriptions. International Journal of Geo-Information, 7 (6): Paper 221 (30 pages).
  • Winter, S., Hamzei, E., Van De Weghe, N., & Ooms, K. A Graph Representation for Verbal Indoor Route Descriptions. In Spatial Cognition 18. (accepted)
  • Hamzei, E., Chen, H., Hua, H., Vasardani, M., Tomko, M., & Winter, S. Deriving place graphs from spatial databases. In Proceedings of Research@Locate 18, the Annual Conference on Spatial Information in AU and NZ, in conjunction with Locate18, 9-12 March 2018, Adelaide, AU. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2087/paper4.pdf
  • Hao Wang, Stephan Winter, Martin Tomko (2018): Answering Queries for Near Places. Abstract / talk at the STEM Education Research Centre Spatial Reasoning Conference, Canberra, January 30 – February 1.
  • Truelove, M., Vasardani, M., Winter, S. (2017). ‘Testing the event witnessing status of micro-bloggers from evidence in their microblogs.’ PLOS ONE 12(12): Paper e0189378. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0189378.
  • Kim, J., Vasardani, M. and Winter, S. (2017). Similarity matching for integrating spatial information extracted from place descriptions. International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS), Vol. 31(1): 56-80.
  • Kim, J., Vasardani, M. and Winter, S. (2017). Landmark Extraction from Web-Harvested Place Description. Künstliche Intelligenz, Vol. 31(2): 151-159. doi:10.1007/s13218-016-0467-3
  • Vasardani, M., Stirling, L. and Winter, S. (2017). The Preposition “at” from a Spatial Language, Cognition, and Information Systems Perspective. Semantics and Pragmatics, Vol. 10, Article 3 (38 pages). https://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.10.3
  • Truelove, M., Vasardani, M. and Winter, S. (2016): Introducing a Framework for Automatically Differentiating Witness Accounts of Events from Social Media. In: Duckham, M. (Ed.), Research at Locate 2016. ASIERA, Melbourne, Australia.
  • Kim, J., Vasardani, M. and Winter, S. (2015) From descriptions to depictions: A dynamic sketch map drawing strategy. Spatial Cognition & Computation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 16 (1): 29-53
  • Dittrich, A., Vasardani, M. and Winter, S., Baldwin, T., & Liu, F. (2015). A Classification Schema for Fast Disambiguation of Spatial Prepositions. Paper presented at the 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on GeoStreaming (IWGS), Seattle, WA
  • Kim, J., Vasardani, M. and Winter, S. (2015) Harvesting large corpora for generating place graphs. In: S. Bertel, P. Kiefer, A. Klippel, S. Scheider and T. Thrash, eds. International Workshop on Cognitive Engineering for Spatial Information Processes (CESIP), in conjunction with COSIT 2015
  • Chen, H., Vasardani, M. and Winter, S. (2015) Maintaining Relational Consistency in a Graph-Based Place Database. In Proceedings of Research@Locate 15, the Annual Conference on Spatial Information in AU and NZ, in conjunction with Locate15, 9-12 March 2015, Brisbane, AU
  • Liu, Fei, Maria Vasardani and Timothy Baldwin (2014) Automatic Identification of Locative Expressions from Social Media Text: A Comparative Analysis, In Proceedings of The 4th International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2014), Shanghai, China.
  • Truelove, M.; Vasardani, M.; Winter, S. (2014): Testing a model of witness accounts in social media. In: Purves, R.; Jones, C. B. (Eds.), Geographic Information Retrieval. ACM Press, Dallas, TX
  • Chan Chun, K., Vasardani, M. and Winter, S. (2014) Getting lost in cities: spatial patterns of phonetically confusing street names, Transactions in GIS, published online August 2014, John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
  • Truelove, M., Vasardani, M. and Winter, S. (2014) Towards credibility of micro-blogs: characterising witness accounts, GeoJournal published online April 2014, Springer Netherland.
  • Chan Chun, K., Vasardani, M. and Winter, S. (2014) Leveraging Twitter to detect event names associated with a place. Journal of Spatial Science, Vol. 59 (1): 137-155.
  • Truelove, M.; Winter, S. (2013): Emotional Cartography for Crowd-Sourcing Elusive Spatial Concepts. In: Arrowsmith, C. et al. (Eds.), Progress in Geospatial Science Research, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 512-532.
  • Gaitanis, H.; Winter, S. (2013): Towards a semantically and spatially richer address data model. In: Liu, C. (Ed.), 10th International Symposium on Location Based Services, Shanghai, China.
  • Khan, A.; Vasardani, M.; Winter, S. (2013): Extracting Spatial Information From Place Descriptions. In: Scheider, S. et al. (Eds.), ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Computational Models of Place 2013. ACM Press, Orlando, FL, pp. 62-69.
  • Scheider, S.; Adams, B.; Janowicz, K.; Vasardani, M.; Winter, S. (Eds.) (2013): ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Computational Models of Place. The Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., New York, 74 pp
  • Vasardani, M., Timpf, S., Winter, S. and Tomko, M. (2013) From Descriptions to Depictions: A conceptual Framework. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2013), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 8116, Springer International Publishing, pg. 299-319. This paper was awarded Best Paper Award at the conference, Sept. 2th – 6th, in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, UK .
  • Christensen, N. and Rajabifard, A. (2013) Answering the Question of ‘where’ for the ICT Industry: A Use Case Study. (A PSMA Case). Technical Report. Department of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne
  • Vasardani, M., Winter, S. and Richter, K-F. (2013) Locating Place Names from Place Descriptions. International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS), Vol. 27 (12): 2509-2532.
  • Sun, X.; Winter, S. (2013): The Evaluation of Public Transport Journey Planners, Surveying & Spatial Sciences Conference 2013. SSSI, Canberra, Australia.
  • Richter, D., Vasardani, M., Stirling, L., Richter, K.-F., Winter, S. (2012) Zooming in – Zooming out Hierarchies in Place Descriptions. In Krisp, J.M. (Ed) Progress in Location-Based Services, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, pp 339-355.
  • Winter, S.; Freksa, C. (2012): Approaching the Notions of Place by Contrast. Journal of Spatial Information Science, 2012 (5): 31-50.
  • Vasardani, M., Winter, S., Richter, K-F., Stirling, F. and Richter, D. (2012) Spatial Interpretations of Preposition ‘at’. Accepted in the First ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Crowdsourced and Volunteered Geographic Information 2012, in conjunction with ACM SIGSPATIAL 2012.
  • Richter, D., Richter, K-F., Winter, S. and Stirling, F. (2012) How People Describe their Place: Identifying Predominant Types of Place Descriptions. Accepted in the First ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Crowdsourced and Volunteered Geographic Information 2012, in conjunction with ACM SIGSPATIAL 2012.
  • Vasardani, M., Winter, S., Richter, K-F., Janowicz, K. and Mackaness, W. (eds.) Proceedings of International Workshop on Place-related Knowledge Acquisition Research (P-KAR) 2012, Monastery Seeon, Germany, August 31, 2012, CEUR-WS.org, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-881.
  • Tytyk, I., and Baldwin, T. (2012) Component-wise Annotation and Analysis of Informal Place Descriptions. In Proceedings of International Workshop on Place-related Knowledge Acquisition Research (P-KAR 2012), Monastery Seeon, Germany, August 31, 2012, CEUR-WS.org, online ceur-ws.org/Vol-881/paper3.pdf.
  • Winter, S, and Vasardani, M. (2012) The Meaning of Negated Spatial Relationships. In Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH 2012).
  • Richter, K.-F.; Winter, S. (2011) Citizens as Database: Conscious Ubiquity in Data Collection . In: Pfoser, D. et al. (Eds.), Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD) Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6849. Springer, Berlin, pp. 445-448. This paper won the CCC Headwaters Awards (second place).
  • Winter, S.; Richter, K.-F.; Baldwin, T.; Cavedon, L.; Stirling, L.; Duckham, M.; Kealy, A.; Rajabifard, A. (2011) Location-Based Mobile Games for Spatial Knowledge Acquisition. In: Janowicz, K. et al. (Eds.), Cognitive Engineering for Mobile GIS, Belfast, Maine, USA.
  • Richter, K.-F.; Winter, S. (2011) Harvesting User-Generated Content for Semantic Spatial Information: The Case of Landmarks in OpenStreetMap. In: Hock, B. (Ed.), Proceedings of the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Biennial Conference 2011. Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute, Wellington, NZ, pp. 75-86.
  • Truelove, M.; Winter, S. (2011): Revisiting Emotional Cartography to Crowd-Source Elusive Spatial Concepts. In: Dickins, G. (Ed.), Geospatial Science Research. RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, Paper 13.
  • Wu, Y.; Winter, S. (2011): Interpreting Destination Descriptions in a Cognitive Way. In: Hois, J. et al. (Eds.), Workshop on Computational Models for Spatial Language Interpretation and Generation (CoSLI-2). CEUR-WS.org, Boston, USA, pp. 8-15.
  • Winter, S. and Truelove, M. (2010). Talking about Place Where It Matters. In: A. Frank and D. Mark, eds. Las Navas 20th Anniversary Meeting on Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space, Las Navas, Spain.
  • Winter, S., Bennett, R., Truelove, M., Rajabifard, A., Duckham, M., Kealy, A. and Leach, J. (2010) Spatially enabling ‘place’ information. In Spatially Enabling Society: Research, Emerging Trends, and Critical Assessment. A. Rajabifard, (ed.), GSDI Association

Live presentations

  • 3th ACM Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2014), Melbourne, Australia, November 2014: Spatial Cognitive Engineering (Keynote, Stephan Winter)
  • Spatial Cognition 2014, Bremen, Germany, September 2014: Connecting Location and Place (Keynote, Stephan Winter)
  • 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, Castellon, Spain, June 2014: Towards intelligent geospatial systems connecting location and place (Keynote, Stephan Winter)
  • Winter, S.; Baldwin, T.; Cavedon, L.; Stirling, L.; Kealy, A.; Duckham, M.; Rajabifard, A.; Richter, K.-F. (2011): Starting to Talk about Place, Surveying and Spatial Sciences Conference. Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute, Wellington, NZ.

Data & resources

Datasets

Towards a place-based geographic information system dataset

Download: Access the Witness Account Annotation Case Study Event Sample Data [1.19mb zip]

Relevant external datasets

Resources

  • Core Location Vocabulary
    The Core Location Vocabulary is a simplified, reusable and extensible data model that captures the fundamental characteristics of a location.
  • Lodum
    Linked Open Data University in Munster
  • OpenStreetMap
  • Place on schema.org
    This site provides a collection of schemas, ie, html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers
  • Points of Interest Core
    This document describes a data model and XML syntax for representing information about points of interest (POI) on the World Wide Web

News

New publication

1 December 2017

Congratulations Marie. I am pleased to publish a post about Marie’s new paper. Here is the short summary of the new publication.

This paper demonstrates a framework of processes for identifying potential witnesses of events from evidence they post to social media. The research defines original evidence models for micro-blog content sources, the relative uncertainty of different evidence types, and models for testing evidence by combination. Methods to filter and extract evidence using automated and semi-automated means are demonstrated using a Twitter case study event. Further, an implementation to test extracted evidence using Dempster Shafer Theory of Evidence are presented. The results indicate that the inclusion of evidence from micro-blog text and linked image content can increase the number of micro-bloggers identified at events, in comparison to the number of microbloggers identified from geotags alone. Additionally, the number of micro-bloggers that can be tested for evidence corroboration or conflict, is increased by incorporating evidence identified in their posting history.

Testing the event witnessing status of micro-bloggers from evidence in their micro-blogs, Marie Truelove, Maria Vasardani, Stephan Winter, PLOS ONE, accepted 2 December 2017.

Hackfest

27 November 2017

Our Hackfest workshop 2017 was held on 23 and 24 November at the University of Melbourne. It was an interesting and productive meeting, where RHD students from the project had the opportunity to work collaboratively on creating place graphs from maps. The idea was selected on the first day out of several promising ideas. Later in the evening, the algorithm was designed to take a selected map area as input and produce a place graph as output. Finally, on the second day, the implementation was completed, and a demo was successfully created at the end of the Hackfest.

Screen shot from a hackfest project
Hackfest demo screen shot

Gaming for research

23 August 2017

On Open Day at the University of Melbourne, 20 August 2017, spatial information researchers had set up a location-based game for all visitors. This game, a sort of scavenger hunt, asks people to find a marked location on campus, and provide a place description good enough to be found by their friends or family members. The collected place descriptions help the researchers create navigation systems that communicate like people do.

Phone screen shot of the place game showing the campus

New Project

7 August 2017

The Australian Research Council funds a new Discovery Project (DP170100109): Making human place knowledge digestible by computers. This project will run 2017–2019. The chief investigators are Stephan Winter, Tim Baldwin, Jochen Renz (ANU), Martin Tomko, Maria Vasardani, and Werner Kuhn (UCSB). We will report about progresses on this website.

Talking about Place

26 November 2014

A video that summarises some of the work we have been doing toward ‘smarter’ spatial services.

Last annual workshop

28 October 2014

Our last ‘Talking about Place’ Annual Workshop will take place on Friday 21 November 2014, at the University of Melbourne. This is an opportunity for academic and industry team members alike to see the products of our research over the last year, and discuss and reflect on the project overall. Please find the event details below. We are looking forward to productive workshop!

Event details

Date: Friday 21, November

Time: 9:30am–12:30 pm with lunch to follow (12:45pm–2:00pm).

Location: Jim Potter Room, in the Old Physics building, University of Melbourne.

Program

09:30–10:00: Morning coffee/tea

10:00–10:30: Welcome and Opening Talk (Stephan Winter)

10:30–11:30: Project outcomes presentations (Tim Baldwin, Andre Dittrich, Junchul

Kim, Marie Truelove, David Lin, Hao Chen, Yuqi Wang )

11:30–12:15: Discussion with Industry partners

12:15–12:30: Plenum

12:45–14:00: Lunch at the University House, University of Melbourne.

Closed: Call for Papers – Spatial Cognition and Computation

29 October 2013

Guest editors

Simon Scheider (University of Münster, Germany), Maria Vasardani (University of Melbourne, Australia), Chris Jones (Cardiff University, UK), Ross Purves (University of Zurich, Switzerland), and Stephan Winter (University of Melbourne, Australia)

Aim and topic

Even though places are immensely useful referents for geocoding and interlinking other information, e.g., in terms of gazetteers, place related information from the web, social media, or common language often still needs to be generated, linked and curated in a manual and time consuming fashion. This problem has become increasingly pressing in the age of Big Data, where the generation, provenance, curation and quality of place related data becomes uncontrollable and does not scale with the growth of other data in need of georeferencing.

This special issue aims to present cutting edge research on approaching computational models of place from various related disciplines, according to the spirit and scope of the journal, such as computing, cognition, language, artificial intelligence or geography.

Submitted papers will be reviewed to the usual standards of the journal. Instructions for submitting manuscripts can be found on the journal’s website: Spatial Cognition & Computation. Submissions should not exceed 6000 words.

Talking about Place–Annual Progress Workshop (2013)

29 October 2013

Our Annual “Talking about Place” Workshop will take place this Friday 29 November, at the University of Melbourne. This is an opportunity for academic and industry team members alike to interact, discuss and brainstorm on issues related to our project. Please find the event details below. We are looking forward to productive workshop!

Event details

Date: Friday 29, November

Time: 9:30am–12:30 pm with lunch to follow (12:45pm–2:00pm).

Location: Jim Potter Room, in the Old Physics building, University of Melbourne.

Draft Program

09:30–10:00 : Welcome with some coffee/tea

10:00–10:15 : Setting the Scene (Stephan Winter)

10:15–11:00 : Progress presentations (academics: Tim Baldwin, Lesley Stirling, Matt Duckham, Maria Vasardani, Harry Gaitanis, Marie Truelove, Keith Chan, Junchul Kim, Qawiimah Sardani, Peter Schinner)

11:00–11:45 : Industry partners’ input

11:45–12:15 : Break out session – Identifying future research questions

12:15–12:30 : Plenum

12:45–14:00: Lunch at the University House, University of Melbourne.

Workshop on Computational Models of Place 2013

20 June 2013

Two members of our academic team, namely Stephan Winter and Maria Vasardani, are co-organizers of the ACM Workshop on Computational Models of Place (CoMP 2013), in conjunction with the 21st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, November 5-8, 2013, Orlando, FL, USA.

The rest of the members of the organizing committee are:

Simon Scheider, University of Muenster, Germany (main organizer)

Krzysztof Janowicz, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Detailed information about the workshop, which builds up from past, related workshops such as last year’s, can be found at Place-related Knowledge Acquisition Research workshop (P-KAR 2012).

Our industry partners are cordially invited to participate, if they wish, to the workshop with or without paper submissions.

Academic Visitors Presentations: Wednesday 27 February

13 March 2013

After a successful seminar with our three academic visitors, on Wednesday 27 February, you can find the abstracts and the presentations of their talks here.

Prof Christian Freksa, Cognitive Systems, University of Bremen, Germany

The power of space and time – spatial and temporal structures can replace computational effort

Abstract: Spatial structures determine the ways we perceive our environment and the ways we act in it in important ways. Spatial structures also determine the ways we think about our environment and how we solve spatial problems abstractly. When we use graphics to visualize certain aspects of spatial and non-spatial entities, we exploit the power of spatial structures to better understand important relationships. We also are able to imagine spatial structures and to apply mental operations to them. Similarly, the structure of time determines the course of events in cognitive processing. In my talk I will present knowledge representation research in spatial cognition. I will demonstrate the power of spatial structures in comparison to formal descriptions that are conventionally used for spatial problem solving in computer science. I suggest that spatial and temporal structures can be exploited for the design of powerful ‘spatial computers’. I will show that spatial computers can be particularly suitable and efficient for spatio-temporal problem solving but may also be used for abstract problem solving in non-spatial domains.

The power of space and time presentation (PDF)

Prof Antonio Krüger, German Center for Artificial Intelligence and Saarland University, Germany

Intelligent User Interfaces for Instrumented (Retail) Environments

Abstract: In the Innovative Retail Laboratory (IRL) we develop and conduct tests in a large number of different fields all connected to intelligent shopping consultants. The IRL is an application-oriented research laboratory of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), which was installed in the head office of the German chain store GLOBUS SB-Warenhaus Holding in St. Wendel. One part of this research is the development of intelligent user interfaces in such an instrumented retail environment. In this talk I would like to highlight a few examples for various types of User Interfaces ranging from mobile AR applications to instrument shopping trolleys. More: https://www.innovative-retail.de/. The talk concludes with some further examples from recent HCI Research conducted at DFKI.

The Innovative Retail Laboratory and HCI at DFKI presentation (PDF)

Prof Sabine Timpf, Geoinformatics, University of Augsburg, Germany

Modeling spatial behavior for agent-based simulations

Abstract: Humans constantly interact with geo-space. Understanding how this interaction with and in geo-space works is crucial for the development of subtle assistive technology. In my talk I will report on our efforts to model human-environment interaction using affordances, activity theory and agent-based simulation.

Modelling spatial behaviour for agent-based simulations presentation (PDF)

Seminar with three academic visitors–27 March 2013

10 February 2013

We are pleased to have three academic visitors, namely Christian Freksa from the University of Bremen, Germany, Sabine Timpf from the University of Augsburg, Germany, and Antonio Krüger from DFKI, Germany visiting us for a few weeks and collaborating on various projects, including the ‘Talking about Place’. They are invited to present their relevant research on a special seminar that our project’s academic group is organising on Wednesday, 27 March, 10:00–12:00 at Brown Theatre (University of Melbourne, Building 193, (EEE) Ground floor). You are all welcome to attend!

Annual Progress Workshop (2012) Report

2 November 2012

Our Annual Progress Workshop 2012 was held on Friday 26, October 2012, at the University of Melbourne. It was a very interesting and productive meeting, where academic partners had the opportunity to present their work on the project so far, and industry partners showcased their relevant activities, and expressed their ideas and needs for the upcoming year. You can find a compilation of the academic presentations (PDF). The workshop ended with a break-out session, during which three groups with mixed participants were formed and discussed on specific issues, brainstorming on ideas and questions to be answered through the project. You can find the compiled report of the break-out sessions (PDF).

Annual Progress Workshop (2012)

21 October 2012

Our Annual ‘Talking about Place’ Workshop will take place this Friday 26, at the University of Melbourne. This is an opportunity for academic and industry team members alike to interact, discuss and brainstorm on issues related to our project. Please find the event details below. We are looking forward to productive workshop!

Event details

Date: Friday 26, October

Time: 9:30am–12:30 pm with lunch to follow (12:45pm–2:00pm).

Location: Jim Potter Room, in the Old Physics building, University of Melbourne.

Draft Program

09:30–10:00 : Welcome with some coffee/tea

10:00–10:15 : Setting the Scene (Stephan Winter)

10:15–11:00 : Progress presentations (academics: Tim Baldwin, Kai-Florian Richter, Maria Vasardani, Harry Gaitanis, Marie Truelove, Keith Chan, Nilofer Tambuwala)

11:00–11:45 : Industry partners’ presentations (PSMA, ESTA, DSE)

11:45–12:15 : Break out session–Identifying future research questions

12:15–12:30 : Plenum

12:45–14:00: Lunch at the University House, University of Melbourne.

P-KAR Workshop Proceedings and Report

26 September  2012

The report from the Place-related Knowledge Acquisition Research (P-KAR 2012) workshop (PDF) that was held on August 31, in conjunction with Spatial Cognition 2012, can be downloaded.

The proceedings of the P-KAR Workshop are available online.

Place-related Knowledge Acquisition Research Workshop (P-KAR 2012)

7 May 2012

Our academic project team, in cooperation with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, UK and the University of California, Santa Barbara, US, is organizing the workshop in conjunction with the Spatial Cognition Conference 2012, in Germany.