Dear Colleagues,

Some of you have contributed chapters to the new book "The Geospatial Web - How Geobrowsers, Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society", which is now available from online bookstores and will be shipping May 18th. The corresponding Web site at www.geospatialweb.com provides the table of contents, preface, foreword, short biographies of the authors as well as a sample chapter on "Media Platforms for Managing Geotagged Knowledge Repositories".

The book contains a total of 25 chapters. Many of them address environmental issues, covering a broad range of applications from natural hazard exposure assessment to mapping soil and air quality, customized fire alerts, disaster and crisis management, and the monitoring of environmental issues in news coverage. Your help in spreading the word about this new publication is most appreciated (you will also receive a plain text book announcement by separate e-mail that should be easier to distribute).

Geospatial media including their social and environmental implications not only represent the primary focus of the book, but also feature prominently in the themes of upcoming conferences such as Digital Earth, GeoWeb, I-Media and EnviroInfo-2007 (see event overview below). At the same time, environmental issues are gaining hold in the programs of the large information systems conferences, as exemplified by the current call on Environmental Sustainability of ICT, part of the 18th Australasian Conference on Information Systems, and the Environmental Decision Support Track at this year's Americas Conference on Information Systems.

Please do not hesitate to contact us to include relevant calls or publications in upcoming newsletters, and feel free to add your events to the ECOresearch calendar at any time.

With best regards,

Arno Scharl
Klaus Tochtermann

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Environment 2.0
(May 10-12): Part of the Social Technologies Summit, Environment 2.0 aims for a new international initiative in which two worlds collide. When the environment is mapped, tagged and digitized it becomes navigable, computable and manipulable. How can this approach to environment, one which is iconic for our times, be reconciled with the need to address climate change?
Find out more

EcoSummit 2007
(May 22-27): This Eco Summit will focus on integrative aspects of all ecological science and its application under the general theme of "Ecological Complexity and Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities for 21st-Century's Ecology". The aim of this Eco Summit is to encourage a greater integration of both the natural and social sciences with the policy and decision-making community to develop a better understanding of the complex nature of ecological systems.

Digital Earth 2007
(June 5-8): Digital Earth is a visionary concept for "spaceship Earth" sparked by R. Buckminster Fuller, grokked by the Apollo astronauts returning from their moon missions, and popularized by Vice President Al Gore. It calls for a virtual representation of the Earth that is spatially referenced and interconnected with digital knowledge archives from around the planet with vast amounts of scientific, natural, and cultural information to describe and understand the Earth and human activities.

Communication and Environment
(June 22-25): This conference will take as its central theme the mediated relationship between human culture and the natural environment. Communication has a major impact on the way we comprehend the natural world and by extension, the way in which we live in the natural world. Our material practices then have an impact on not only nearby places but also faraway places, both natural and cultural. This conference will explore the symbolic relationship between nature and culture and the inextricable connection between nature and its human meanings.

Sustainability Perspectives for Higher Education
(July 5-7): This conference is to be understood as a significant contribution to the UN-Decade “Education for Sustainable Development”. It will focus mainly on higher education’s contributions to different processes of change - local, regional or international - during transition to global sustainability. The goal is to provide room for current debates and experiences which refer to the relation between the North and the South.
Find out more

GeoWeb-2007
(July 23-27): The theme “From Mashups to Infrastructure” reflects the breadth, the evolution and the growing maturity of the GeoWeb. This theme acknowledges the highly visible consumer applications that helped spawn the GeoWeb while emphasizing that the GeoWeb is increasingly playing a meaningful role in mainstream, mission-critical applications. As such, the GeoWeb is now a key component in critical decision-making across a broad spectrum of market segments and application domains.