"What are the Grand Challenges of GIScience?"
AAG Session 4421
Saturday, April 17th
12:40-2:20 p.m.
Virginia Suite B, Marriott

Phil Yang - Discussant w/audience - Phil shares his common themes that he saw running through the presentations:
- definition of challenges, they must be tractable
- sensors a common theme; citizen sensors (VGI)
- space-time!
- semantics

Questions:
implications of geo-social informatics; accessing the data makes you a part of the social network too - privacy, ethics at play here? yes - users

citizens as sensors - opportunity for bias (Strat Directions theme of assessing quality of VGI) - need case studies to find this out
gaming technology?

highly dynamic data access for spatiotemporal analysis - direct access to govt information, making data available to general public might accelerate progress; reason that data.gov exists essentially - do we need a science section of data.gov (users of web site is still not very well defined)
and DataNet of NSF is focused on this too - identify what the barriers are and remove them for better access; 2 sites exist now and 3 sites to come online
key issue is resolution too 

mashups and metadata - how to get around issues of lots of data with little or no metadata or lots of metadata with just a little bit of data? motivating factor to improve legacy data with self-extracting metadata methods (so the datasets themselves can generate the metadata); and this is also a requirement of the DataNet program, self-extraction

** So where do we go from here; should we build on Peggy's NSF workshop? is there momentum to build further?
** Is the appeal to NSF CISE the same as to Geography & Spatial Science?

Yes, series of workshops greatly encouraged - 

[Dawn: We should go to CISE *and* Geography & Spatial Science] or make the next UCGIS Summer Assembly a Grand Challenges focus??
Peggy would be glad to help
Space-Time emphasis at AAG Seattle! UCGIS will be involved in that
Thanks also to ESRI
This panel is one perspective, but more community input needed and should be a community effort.