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The Thirteenth International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017) will be held in L’Aquila, Italy, on September 4-8 2017.

» About COSIT

Established in 1993, COSIT is a biennial international conference series concerned with theoretical aspects of space and spatial information. COSIT was started to establish a counterpoint to several concurrent applied GIS conferences at which reports on applications and development in GIS technology were made but often without a contribution to scientific theory and literature. The focus at COSIT from the beginning has been on theories of space and time relevant to the establishment and the advancement of (geo)spatial information science.

Spatial information theory is concerned with all aspects of space and spatial environments as experienced, represented and elaborated by humans, other animals and artificial agents. The scope of the conference includes both the conceptualization of frameworks for specific spatio-temporal domains, as well as the development of general theories of space and time and theories of spatial and temporal information.

» Conference Format

The aim of COSIT is to bring together researchers from different disciplines for an intensive scientific exchange. This aim is facilitated by the presentation and discussion of a restricted number of papers and posters.

The main conference is preceded by a day (September 4) of parallel satellite workshops and tutorials on specialized topics of interest. If you are interested at organizing a satellite workshop or tutorial, please refer the Call for Workshop and Tutorial Proposals for details on the submission process.

The main conference is designed as a three-day event (September 5-7) and offers two distinct submission streams: full papers and posters. For details on the both submission types, please refer the Call for Papers.

Finally, a Doctoral Colloquium will be held on the day after the end of the main conference (September 8), which provides a forum where young researchers can present their work to the community and receive expert feedbacks, comments, and advices. A separate call for doctoral colloquium papers will be released at a later stage.

The following (non­exclusive) topics are indicative of the fields of interest:

COSIT grew out of a series of workshops, NATO Advanced Study Institutes and NSF specialist meetings, all concerned with cognitive and applied aspects of representing large scale space, particularly geographic space. In these meetings, the need for a well-founded theory on spatial information processing was identified, and COSIT was formed in order to provide the platform for the intensive interdisciplinary scientific exchange on this theory.

In 1992, Andrew Frank organized a successful international conference on “GIS—From Space to Territory: Theories and Methods for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning”, in hindsight referred to as COSIT Zero. The first two COSIT conferences, 1993 and 1995, were held in Europe with strong north-American participation (COSIT ‘93: Italy; COSIT ‘95: Austria). Afterwards the conference became a truly international enterprise, held every second year in principle between locations Europe and America (COSIT ’07 was held in Australia).