Wuhan, China, 4-6 December 2009

The 2009 International Workshop on Geographical Information Systems for Transportation (GIS-T 2009), co-organized by the Transportation Research Center at Wuhan University, the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing at Wuhan University, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and ISPRS Inter-Commission Working Group V/I on Land-based Mobile Mapping Systems, took place in Wuhan on December 4-6, 2009. The workshop was co-sponsored by the Beijing Transportation Research Center, ESRI China, Supermap Co. Ltd, and Leador Co. Ltd. This event was built on the great success of the first GIS-T workshop held in 2007.

The GIS-T 2009 workshop covers broad and diverse topics related to the theory, design, analysis, and implementation of GIS-T systems, services, and applications. It aims at providing a high-level international forum for researchers and practitioners to share ideas, explore current and future research topics, and engage professionals working in academia, industry, government and communities to promote GIS for transportation studies.

The workshop received about 200 abstracts and 70 full papers from China, USA, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, South Africa, and Nigeria. The topics cover traffic analysis, simulation and forecasting, transportation data integration and knowledge discovery, GIS algorithms for transportation, route planning in transportation, activity-based travel theory and analysis, GIS-T technologies, and GIS-T services.

After the opening ceremony in the morning on the first day, Prof. Deren Li from Wuhan University, China delivered the first keynote speech entitled "Street Image-based Location-based Services", followed by the second keynote entitled "From Aggregate Snapshots to Disaggregate Dynamics: Implications of individual Tracking Data to GIS-T" given by Prof. Shih-Lung Shaw from the University of Tennessee, USA.

During this two-day workshop, 4 keynote sessions, 8 parallel technical sessions, together with plenary round table discussions and poster sessions were arranged. A total of 10 keynotes, 4 invited papers, and 39 papers were orally presented. This workshop also hosted the opening ceremony of a newly established Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (SIGSPATIAL) China Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

After the workshop, a special issue including peer-reviewed papers selected from the submissions to this workshop will be published in the Journal of Transport Geography in 2010. The organizers announced the decision, which will see the next event held in 2011 in Beijing and every two years after that. Prof. Qingquan Li, Chair of the GIS-T 2009 Workshop Program Committee (who is the Executive VP of Wuhan University and Co-Chair of ISPRS ICWG V/I) said it will give the event the best chance of continuing to grow and make it one of the well-recognized biannual international conferences in the fields of GIS and transportation (reported by Bisheng Yang, Secretary of WG II/1 and Jonathan Li, Chair of ICWG V/I).