Proceedings of the 11th ACM international symposium on Advances in geographic information systems

On behalf of the Program Committee, it is our pleasure to welcome the participants to the 11th International Symposium of ACM GIS, held in New Orleans, Louisiana on November 7th and 8th, 2003. This year's ACM-GIS is the eleventh of a series of symposia/workshops that began in 1993 with the aim of bringing together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners carrying out research and development in novel systems based on geo-spatial data and knowledge, and fostering interdisciplinary discussions and research in all aspects of geographic information systems.Following an international call for papers, 82 papers were submitted and reviewed by an international panel of experts in the field of GIS. Of the 82 submitted papers, 22 were accepted (yielding an acceptance rate of 27%). The size of the submission indicates the continued health of the field and interest in it. All final papers, modified according to comments from the reviewers, appear in this volume.The invited keynote talk was from Dr. David Maguire, who presented a lecture entitled "Beyond the GIS Desktop".We would like to thank the Program Committee for giving so freely of their time and insightful opinions. Their reviews were based upon paper originality, significance, relevance, presentation and technical quality. Many of the submitted papers required further review and discussion. We appreciate the efforts of the reviewers in arriving at consensus on the papers involved. This process requires much time and effort.