Wisconsin Geospatial News

Save the date for the UW-Madison Geospatial Summit – April 20, 2015

This year the UW-Madison Geospatial Summit will be held on Monday, April 20, 2015, at Union South.

We have two keynote speakers planned for the event.

Dr. David Cowen is Carolina Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former chair of the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina. Cowen’s work has focused on increasing the effectiveness of activities in the public sector through the use of geographic concepts and GIS. In addition to his academic work, he is a former Chair of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC), a Fellow of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), and a National Associate of the National Academies of Science. Cowen chaired the National Research Council study committee that wrote “Land Parcel Databases: A National Vision” and co-authored the recent Coalition of Geospatial Organizations (COGO) Report Card on the U.S. National Spatial Data Infrastructure.

Dr. Nick Chrisman is currently editor of Cartography and Geographic Information Science, the journal of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. From 1972 to 1982, Chrisman was affiliated with the Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, which pioneered early efforts with GIS and computer mapping software and applications. From 1982 to 1987 he was a professor in Landscape Architecture at UW-Madison where he worked with a multidisciplinary team on the Dane County Land Records Project. Chrisman has taught at the University of Washington, Université Laval, and RMIT University, and is the former Scientific Director of the GEOIDE Network in Canada.

We are fortunate to be able to attract these speakers to the Summit this year. In doing so we have rearranged our usual Thursday event to a Monday to take advantage of our keynote speakers’ participation in the Association of American Geographers meeting in Chicago later that week.

Additional details of the Summit — including a call for presentations — will be coming out soon. Stay tuned!