Geospatial Visual Analytics Workshop at the GIScince 2008 Conference (Park City, Utah, USA, 23-26 September 2008) and Special Issue of the CaGIS journal (provisional issue Vol.36 No.3, July 2009) The workshop is a follow-up to the successful workshop on “Visualization, Analytics and Spatial Decision Support” at the GIScience’2006 conference. The previous workshop attracted about 70 participants. Selected workshop papers, including the "Setting the research agenda" paper, were published as a special issue of IJGIS, v.21(8), 2007. The workshop supported by the Commission on GeoVisualization (http://geoanalytics.net/ica) of the International Cartographic Association aims at bringing together researchers from relevant fields to address research issues of geospatial visual analytics in the multidisciplinary context of GI Science. A big part of data that the modern society deals with has both spatial and temporal characteristics. Visualisation of spatial and temporal data traditionally belongs to the research area known as geographic visualisation, or geovisualisation. Geovisual Analytics (short for Geospatial Visual Analytics) extends geovisualisation research by enhancing purely visual and interactive methods with new possibilities provided by computational techniques such as data mining, statistics, and optimisation. Potential enhancements come also from developing methods to support analytical reasoning, argumentation, knowledge building, and knowledge communication. The frontier research problems in Geovisual Analytics involve the scalability of tools and their usability. The goal of the workshop is to present the most advanced methods and applications of geovisual analytics, discuss problems and possible approaches to solving them, and define appropriate directions for further research. Major scientific topics to be addressed: - scalability - how to make visualisation suitable for huge data sets (e.g. with the help of database technologies and data mining); - usability – how to fit the tools to the needs, abilities and conditions of different categories of users (for example, domain experts vs. decision makers); - effectiveness - how to ensure the effectiveness of visual analytics tools and how to test and prove it; - innovative visually driven methods of data analysis addressing the problems of scalability, usability, and effectiveness. Challenging applications of geovisual analytics: - decision support: * generation, evaluation and comparison of alternatives, * accounting for uncertainty of decision recommendations, * explanation, justification, and communication of results; - education: enhancing learning and knowledge transfer; - scientific research: acquiring new knowledge; - collaboration: supporting communication, cooperative problem solving and knowledge construction. Authors are invited to submit original research contributions or application reports in English. The authors are requested to stress the multidisciplinary character of their approaches and their relevance to the theme of the workshop. We encourage submissions presenting early stages of cutting-edge research and development, as well as submissions from PhD students. Organizers and Guest Editors: Gennady and Natalia Andrienko, Piotr Jankowski, Menno-Jan Kraak ICA Commission on GeoVisualization, http://geoanalytics.net/ica Submission and selection procedure: - March 3, 2008 - CFP announced - June 1, 2008 - Authors should submit extended abstracts. Abstracts should be up to four pages in length. Illustrations and supplementary online materials are welcome. The Program Committee will review the submitted extended abstracts and evaluate them according to the following criteria: relevance to call; soundness of methodological approach; degree of novelty & innovation; progress demonstrated; potential impact; potential interest to the GeoVisualization and Visual Analytics communities. - June 30, 2008 - Guest editors will select abstracts for the presentation at the workshop and notify authors. Accepted extended abstracts will be published online at the workshop web site. - September 23, 2008 - workshop at GIScience 2008 - November 28, 2008 - Full papers for the special issue are submitted - January 30, 2009 - Authors will be notified about acceptance for the special issue. - February 28, 2009 - Deadline for submitting final papers and responding to reviewer’s comments. - July 2009 - Post-workshop special issue of CaGIS Please send all inquiries to G.Andrienko: gennady dot andrienko at iais dot fraunhofer dot de Web site: http://geoanalytics.net/GeoVisualAnalytics08 ____________________________________________________________