20 Sep 2005 - GeoWeb 2006

Vancouver, Canada July 24 - July 28, 2006

The past several years has seen the emergence of two key components that are the foundation for a revolution in the world of geographic information. The first is the realization of the importance of geographic information in the world of commerce. While long understood by the professional GIS community, it has taken the search engine community with its focus on advertising and broad information access to really bring this into the consciousness of the everyday citizen. The second is the arrival and broad acceptance of markup languages (XML) and web services, and their common adoption in the world of the professional GIS and the new world of mass commercial utilization of location information. Together these two components provide the fuel and the technology base to build a new location-enabled economy.

The GeoWeb conference aims to bring together two worlds which up to now have been largely separate: the world of professional GIS - the world focused on the standards of the OpenGeospatial Consortium (OGC) and ISO TC/211, and the broader world of the web - the world focused on the standards of W3C and allied technologies. It is the belief of the conference organizers that important synergies will come from this interaction in terms of business opportunities, business and policy models, technology development and specifications.

On the technical front, the conference will continue the themes of the successful GML and GI Web Services (formerly GML Days) conferences from which this conference has evolved - but will expand to include not only GML and OGC web services (WFS, WMS, WRS etc.), but also LandXML, geoRSS, KML, J-PIP and several others. It is our belief that the in-person interaction enabled by this conference will serve to unify the standards world for both developers and the business people and enable the rapid emergence of a GeoWeb - a spatial infrastructure - providing accurate, real-time geographic and geographically related information across the spectrum of government, corporations and the private citizen.

On the business front, the conference will provide opportunities to explore and develop new business models, recognizing that it is business itself that must provide the engine to make the GeoWeb a reality. Issues of government policy, needed legislation (or removal of legislation), security, identity, privacy, monetization and access control are all key issues with respect to geographic and geographically related information - and their discussion and resolution will be a key conference theme.

The GML and GI Web Services conference (http://www.gmldays.org) has shown an international reach since its inception in 2002, and we anticipate that this will both broaden and deepen in the context of GeoWeb 2006. Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth and Yahoo Maps have shown the worldwide excitement generated by the world itself - fusing a local and global focus - this is the key to the GeoWeb.

GeoWeb 2006 will be held in Vancouver, Canada.

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