With this edition of the Proceedings of the Eight Scandinavian Research Conference on Geographical Information Science (GIS ) a 16-year tradition in research for Geographical Information Systems in Scandinavia continues. It started in 1985 when the first ScanGIS conference was organized in Sweden. The subsequent conferences were convened in Norway 1988, in Denmark 1990, in Finland 1992, in Norway 1995, in Sweden 1997 and in Denmark in 1999. Due to the progress of the research in the field of interest, the name of the conference was in 1999 changed. Earlier conferences used the term geographical information systems whereas we now use the term geographical information science.
ScanGIS’2001 is hosted by Department of Mapping Sciences, Agricultural University of Norway and Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.
The Conference programme consists of presentations given by invited keynote speakers and by authors of reviewed papers. During a five-day "virtual committee meeting" held over the Internet, the programme committee selected 18 papers for plenary presentation at the conference. The proceedings follows the sessions of the conference and are subdivided into six parts: Surface modelling, Modelling and implementation of databases, Data integration, Spatial concepts, Visualization, and Applications of geographical information systems.
We would like to express our gratitude to the sponsors, to the members of the Programme Committee and to the reviewers.
May 2001
Jan Terje Bjørke and Håvard Tveite
Editors of ScanGIS’2001