Our special issue in GIS.Science with the extended articles from the AGILE workshop is now in print and available as download from the OGC website.

An AGILE 2009 Pre-Conference Workshop organized by lat/lon and IFGI

We are pleased to announce the gis.science Special Issue about our AGILE 2009 workshop. The issue contains some information about Grids and SDIs in general, a discussion of Craig Lee (OGF) and George Percival (OGC) about the co-existence of OGC and OGF, and resubmissions of the workshop papers as full length papers.

Grid Technologies promise efficient processing of very resource-intensive tasks, either due to very large data sets or hard computational problems. Large-scale Geospatial Applications, e.g. simulation of natural phenomena for disaster management, can benefit significantly, since many spatial problems can be easily split up into smaller tasks. The potential advantages have been recognized by the geospatial community, especially in the domain of earth sciences. In the proposed workshop we want to discuss the following questions:

• What are the potential implications of Grids for geospatial applications and GIScience?
• What (new) problems can be solved by massive parallelization?
• Tiling and stitching, what kind of algorithms exists, and what do we have to consider?
• How can we expect that users entrust their data and algorithms to the Grid?
• Spatial Data Infrastructures and the Semantic Web: how is it related to the Grid?