The GIScience conference series was founded in 2000 with the goal of providing a forum for researchers interested in advancing the fundamental aspects of the prod- tion, dissemination, and use of geographic information. The conference is held bi- nually and attracts people from academia, industry, and government across a host of disciplines including cognitive science, computer science, engineering, geography, information science, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, social science, and stat- tics. Following a very successful conference in Münster, Germany in 2006, this year's conference was held in Park City, Utah, USA, the prior site of the 2002 Winter Ol- pics and home to the annual Sundance Film Festival. There are two forms of submission to the conference: full papers of 6000 words or less and extended abstracts of 500-1000 words for either a presentation or poster. This format was originally designed to capture the cultural difference between researchers who prefer to publish a peer-reviewed conference paper and those who would rather submit an abstract covering work in progress. This year 77 full papers were submitted and reviewed by 3 Program Committee members, of which 24 were selected for pr- entation and inclusion in this volume. Of the 115 extended abstracts that were subm- ted and reviewed by 2 Program Committee members, 47 were accepted for an oral presentation and 25 were accepted for presentation as a poster. The abstracts were published in a second booklet and are available on the GIScience website (http://www. giscience. org).
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Geographic Information Secience, GIScience 2008, held in Park City, UT, USA, in September 2008.
The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. Among the traditional topics addressed are spatial relations, geographic dynamics, and spatial data types. A significant number of papers deal with navigation networks, location-based services, and spatial information query and retrieval. Geo-sensors, mobile computing, and Web mapping rank among the important new directions.
