Urban Big Data Centre joins AGILE
Forming partnerships and collaborating with other organisations is essential if we are going to fully address the complex challenges faced by cities.
We are therefore delighted to announce, on GIS Day, that the Urban Big Data Centre has joined the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE) to represent the University of Glasgow in the European GIScience academic community.
Established in 1998, AGILE’s mission is to promote the geographic information teaching and research community and ensure that the community’s views are fully represented at the European level. They organise initiatives on specific topics to influence the future European geographic information research agenda, such as a recent project that focused on the statistical analysis of the impact of participation biases on OpenStreetMap (OSM) Data.
Another key aspect of AGILE’s work is to facilitate networking activities so that geographic information researchers can meet and exchange ideas and experiences. These include scientific workshops, meetings around key research issues and research conferences such as the forthcoming AGILE 2020 - the 23rd AGILE Conference - which will take place on June 16 – 19 2020 in the city of Chania on the island of Crete, Greece. Researchers, developers, lecturers, students and practitioners are invited to present on the theme of Geospatial Technologies: seeding the future, which aims to highlight the role of geospatial technologies in shaping the future both locally and globally. AGILE also organises PhD schools to foster networking and communication for the next generation of scientists and research leaders.
AGILE’S member organisations are involved in a wide variety of areas relating to GIS such as cartography, geo-computation, spatial analytics, socio-economic and environmental modelling, and surveying. Member application areas include agriculture, forestry, geology, hydrology, housing research, urban planning, transportation and research on the legal and institutional issues associated with the use of geographic information technologies.
At UBDC we are keen to promote the use of GIS through our research, our data service, our Urban Analytics/Urban Transport MSc teaching program and our capacity-building activities. For example, for GIS Day today, we are holding a knowledge share event to highlight the varied GIS projects that colleagues are working on.
We look forward to introducing our work at the next AGILE annual meeting. If you have any queries about our membership of AGILE or our work with GIS, please get in touch.