Sponsored by ESRI and Microsoft
In Cooperation with NCGIA
(National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis)

The Seventh International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, SSTD'2001, will bring together leading researchers and developers in the area of spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal data management to discuss the state-of-the-art in research and applications, and to start setting future research directions.

The steering committee for the conference series on spatial databases, SSD, has chosen to extend the scope of the conference to cover temporal and spatio-temporal data management, in addition to spatial data management. Given the growing interest in spatio-temporal databases and the continuing advances in wireless communications and ubiquitous computing technologies, this broadening is natural and exciting. It will place research on data management in location-based services and mobile information systems prominently within the area of the conference.

The primary focus of SSTD'2001 is on new and original research results in the areas of theoretical foundations, design, implementation, and applications of spatial and temporal database technology, as well as experience reports from application specialists and the commercial community that describe lessons learned in the development, operation, and maintenance of actual systems in practical and innovative applications. The goal is to exchange research ideas and results which will initially contribute to the academic arena, but may also benefit the commercial community in the near future and encourage a dialog between practitioners and researchers.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following as they relate to spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal databases:

• Management of Moving Objects
• Spatial and Temporal Aspects of Mobile Computing
• Ontologies and Taxonomies
• Requirements Analysis for Applications
• Database Design, including Physical, Logical, and Conceptual Modeling
• Data Semantics and Models
• Data Types and Query Languages
• Systems Architectures, including Interoperability
• Spatial and Temporal Extensibility of Object-Relational DBMSs
• Query Processing and Indexing
• Query Optimization Techniques, including Cost Models
• Integration with Existing Commercial Products
• Novel and Challenging Applications
• Experiences with Real Applications and Systems Experiences
• Practical Approaches from Computational Geometry and Constraint Databases
• Design of Experiments and Benchmarks
• Experimental Performance Evaluations and Benchmarking
• Temporal and Spatial Data Warehousing and Decision Support
• Spatial and Temporal Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
• Reasoning
• Similarity
• Uncertainty and Imprecision
• Management of Raster and Vector Data
• Parallel and Distributed Database Systems
• Real-Time Databases
• Active Database Technology
• Use of Spatio-Temporal Data for Simulation
• User Interfaces, including Visual Interfaces
• Spatial and Temporal Data and the Web
• Visualization
• Critical Evaluation of Standards Proposals

Authors are invited to submit electronically original research contributions or experience reports in English. Papers should be no longer than twenty pages, 1.5 spaced, in no smaller than 10 point font with 1 inch margins (left, right, top, bottom.) The program committee may reject papers that exceed this length on the grounds of length alone.

Submitted papers will be refereed by at least three reviewers for quality, correctness, originality, and relevance. Notification and reviews will be communicated via email. Accepted papers will be presented at the conference and included in the proceedings, which will be published by Springer-Verlag as part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series .

Proposals for panels that examine emerging, innovative, or otherwise provocative issues within the conference area are encouraged as well. Panel proposals should include a 1-2 page summary of the topic and the names and affiliations of 3-4 panelists who have made a commitment to participate. A mix of industry and academic panel members is recommended.

Proposals for 90-minute tutorials are also invited on topics within the conference area. Tutorial proposals must be at most 5 pages, they must identify the intended audience, and they must give enough material to provide a sense of what will be covered.

A fully electronic review process is being planned. Technical papers and panel and tutorial proposals should be submitted electronically in postscript or pdf format by Monday, February 19, 2001, following the procedure described on the conference web page. Abstracts of technical papers are due on February 12, 2001.

All deadlines are FIRM.

For further information related to the technical program, please contact one of the PC chairs, at <seeger@informatik.uni-marburg.de> or <csj@cs.auc.dk>. For other questions, please contact the general chair, at <tsotras@cs.ucr.edu>.