The world is changing, and digital reflections of the real world have become increasingly important for governments and business to understand and manage environmental and socio-economic issues, and to channel sustainable development and reduce emissions. The pressure placed on the use of working and living spaces further necessitates decisions that are based on based on more complex, multi-dimensional spatial data.
Digital twins have developed as a critical technology that offers a platform for the testing and analyses of complex systems, which would be impossible to perform with traditional simulators and modular evaluations. However, the development of such technology faces many challenges including discovery, sharing, fusion, analysis and simulation of spatial information, data unavailability to train Machine Learning (models, management, and visualisation of big multidimensional data.
The ISPRS Technical Commission IV 'Spatial Information Sciences' has the mission to advance spatial information science, enable spatial digital twins and empower their development to a metaverse. Some of the challenges the Commission addresses are:
• multidimensional modelling
• fusion of data
• open data
• data management of big data
• spatial analysis and simulation
• mixed reality
• advanced interfaces.
The Commission has a mandate of four years (2022-2026). The research and developments within the commission are carried out within 11 Working Groups and two Inter-Commission Working Groups, coordinated by 55 ISPRS officers and more than 100 members.
The ISPRS Technical Commission IV Symposium provides a forum where researchers and practitioners can come together and share their work and ideas, discuss opportunities and challenges, exchange developments or software tools and discuss future directions. The symposium is also a great place for networking and establishing links between academia, governments and business, and young and emerging professionals in the geospatial sciences.
UPINLBS is an international conference series technically sponsored by the ISPRS addressing the topics of ubiquitous positioning, indoor navigation and location-based service. Indoor positioning is an important research topic because people spend 80% of their time indoors. However, it is still challenging because indoor environments are far more complicated than outdoor environments in terms of spatial geometry and signal propagation. Low-cost high-precision indoor positioning technology is still a major obstacle for us to achieve a high-precise ubiquitous positioning solution. In the topic of ubiquitous positioning, a lot of new research appeared in recent years, such as Beidou + 5G positioning, brain-inspired navigation, marine geodetic positioning and marine resilient PNT, deep space positioning and autonomous navigation, underground positioning, robot localization and positioning with wearable devices.
FOSS4G Perth is a local, community-driven gathering of the Perth open geospatial community, focused on sharing stories and having fun with "Free and Open Source Software For Geospatial". Free software is revolutionising how we work and play, and the geospatial community is embracing open source tools and data with gusto. Prime examples include QGIS, PostGIS, OpenStreetMap, Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, Python-based earth observation libraries and frameworks, GDAL, and many others. The Perth community has been active in this space over the last several years, and the 2024 event is aimed to bring everyone together in a relaxed and fun environment, to connect with each other and with experts from the global ISPRS community. FOSS4G events are run independently by local, regional, and global community groups all over the world.
On behalf of the organisers, the Geospatial Council of Australia, who is the current host of ISPRS TCIV for 2022-2026, we would like to invite you to join us in Perth, Australia on 22-25 October, 2024.