Ross Purves                                                                                     1
                                     Keynote Talk

Abstract

As the call for this workshop stated: "Place has become a hot topic
in GIScience". But what is place, and what are the implications of
developing place-based methods? In my talk, I set out an agenda for
place-based methods, and particularly for retrieval based on place.
In doing so, I explore how unstructured text and tagged images can,
firstly, inform methods which seek to take account of notions
relating to place. Secondly, I illustrate how retrieval methods taking
account of place can be developed using such insights, and discuss
some successes (and failures!) in work developing such techniques.

Speaker’s info:

Ross Purves is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the
University of Zurich in Switzerland. Previously he worked in the
Department of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. His
research focuses on two areas - environmental modeling and
Geographic Information Retrieval. He has been involved, at various
levels, in a variety of funded (and unfunded) projects in these areas.
The TopIce project focuses on the influence of terrain
representation on large-scale environmental modeling and its
contribution to uncertainty of model results. The Swiss National
Science Foundation funds the project. SPIRIT (Spatially-Aware
Information Retrieval on the Internet) focused on the development
of a spatially aware search engine, and was funded under the IST
program of the European Commission. Project Tripod is also
funded under the IST program of the European Commission, and
will investigate the automatic captioning of images, based on their
locations. While in Edinburgh, Ross was involved in a long-running
program of research investigating paleo-climate change in
Patagonia, through a variety of techniques. He is a strong believer
in delivering high-quality teaching in universities, and was involved
in the e-MapScholar project, which sought to develop innovative
and customizable methods for the production of GIScience related
online learning materials.


	
  




Vasardani M., Winter S., Richter K-F., Janowicz K. and Mackaness W. (eds.); P-KAR 2012, pp. 1