Proceedings of the 15th annual ACM international symposium on Advances in geographic information systems

These proceedings contain the papers selected for publication and presentation at the 15th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS) in Seattle, Washington, USA, from November 7th to 9th, 2007. ACM GIS 2007 is the fifteenth event of an annual series of symposia and workshops with the mission to bring together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners carrying out research and development in novel systems based on geo-spatial data and knowledge. The symposium fosters interdisciplinary discussions and research in all aspects of Geographic Information Systems and Science (GIS) and provides a forum for original research contributions covering all conceptual, design, and implementation aspects of GIS and ranging from applications, user interface considerations, and visualization down to storage management and indexing issues. This year, a novelty is that ACM GIS has separated from its long-time host conference in order to become independent and more visible to the GIS community, further expand the spectrum of research topics covered by the symposium, and grow over the next years. The call for papers led to 187 submissions of abstracts and finally to 129 submissions of papers. A program committee of 72 members from the spatial information research community reviewed the papers. Each paper was carefully reviewed by three members of the program committee and additional external reviewers. The selection was based on the quality and originality of the contribution. Out of the 129 paper submissions, 37 submissions were accepted as full papers and 29 submissions were accepted as poster papers. These numbers indicate the continued health, interest, and growth of the research field of geographic information systems, and the need to bring its researchers together. The growing interest in ACM GIS is also shown by the increasing number of papers from the GIS industry as well as the two well known invited speakers Franz Leberl from Microsoft and Michael Jones from Google, who accepted our invitation.