The AGILE (Association of Geographic Information Laboratories for Europe1) with its more than 80 member laboratories seeks to promote the academic teaching and research on Geographic Information Systems. To support the scientific work of young researchers, the AGILE Council decided to initiate a PhD School that is focused specifically on PhD candidates. Major goals of the PhD-School are to provide a platform for the exchange of knowledge and experiences and the discussion of methodologies and approaches, but also to offer an opportunity for networking and personal contacts among the young researchers.
Following a very successful and interesting first event in March 2012 in Wernigerode, Germany, the second AGILE PhD-School was organized from September 30th till October 2nd 2013 at the Benedictine abbey of Frauenwörth on the “Fraueninsel”, an island located in Lake Chiemsee at the edge of the Bavarian Alps in Germany. The abbey provided excellent conditions for undisturbed and intensive work on the scientifically challenging themes.
The 2nd AGILE PhD School brought together twelve participants mainly from European universities in Austria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland and United Kingdom, but also from Israel and Japan. The discussed PhD topics covered a wide spectrum of scientific fields with respect to geoinformatics and GI science, like for example mapping and cartography, generalization, uncertainty modeling and visualization, spatio-temporal pattern analysis, spatial planning and decision making, data fusion, as well as crowd-sourced geodata and community based spatial planning. PhD students and senior scientists presented their subjects, exchanged ideas and critically discussed experiences, goal-settings, results and challenges. This year’s best presentation grant went to Stefano Grassi from ETH Zurich for his contribution on “Development of an integrated spatial optimization model for renewable energy planning”. In addition to presenting and discussing their PhD research, the participants formed teams to initiate common scientific papers, AGILE initiatives and projects related different topics.
The organizers would like to thank the participants who submitted in a first step position papers, provided valuable input in the discussions of the PhD School and afterwards issued long papers that are now composing these proceedings. Further, special thanks go to Thomas Blaschke (University of Salzburg, Austria), who attended as a senior researcher and gave an inspiring presentation on how to successfully organize a PhD. The PhD school has been financed by AGILE and the participants received a subsidiary from AGILE to alleviate their costs.