Following last year’s successful first workshop (see the workshop report ), we are looking forward to organizing the second edition of this event, to be again held in conjunction with the ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS conference.

With the proliferation of the Internet as the primary medium for data publishing and information exchange, we have seen an explosion in the amount of online content available on the Web. Thus, in addition to professionally-produced material being offered free on the Internet, the public has also been allowed, indeed encouraged, making its content available online to everyone. The volumes of such User-Generated Content (UGC) are already staggering and constantly growing.

Our goal has to be to take advantage of this data explosion, which applied to the spatial domain translates to massively collecting and sharing knowledge to ultimately digitize the world. User-generated geospatial content is also commonly referred to as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI).

Researchers have been quick to realize the importance of these developments and have started working on the relevant research problems, giving rise to new topical research areas such as “Geographic Information Retrieval”, “Crowdsourcing”, “Geospatial (Semantic) Web”, “Linked Geospatial Data”, “GeoWeb 2.0” etc.

In this workshop we would like to bring together researchers and practitioners from the above topical areas to discuss open research problems and develop a research agenda for the future. This workshop should also serve as a common platform for the exchange of ideas and results coming from existing research initiatives and projects in the US and Europe that currently investigate this topic.

Participants of the workshop are invited to address the following research questions that are fundamental for future developments in VGI:

How do we combine geospatial and Web data models and languages to model the geospatial data available in the Web today? How do we express queries?
How can linked data, semantics, ontologies, rules and associated reasoning techniques help?
What data structures, algorithms and implemented systems are appropriate for the management of VGI? What are appropriate benchmarks for the measuring the performance and comparing existing systems?
How can we develop user interfaces for VGI? What are appropriate high-level APIs that ease the rapid development of such user interfaces? Can we build on already deployed platforms such as GoogleMaps, BingMaps or OpenStreetMap?
How can we take advantage of user-generated geospatial content? How can we crowdsource high-quality geospatial datasets? What are candidate data fusion techniques?
What are interesting applications of the Geospatial Web in target sectors such as environment, leisure, transportation, earth observation etc.?