The ability to specify geographic location is fundamental to many areas of science, government, and commerce. Traditional approaches to representing geospatial location on computers, such as planar map projection coordinates and the latitude/longitude system, have limitations when used to reference the high resolution global data sets that are becoming increasingly common. Discrete Global Grids (DGGs) are a new class of geospatial data structures based on regular, and often hierarchical, partitions of the earth's surface. DGGs have the potential to enable faster, more efficient, and more accurate solutions in a variety of disciplines, from education to disaster management.

The first International Conference on DGGs was held four years ago in Santa Barbara in March of 2000. The first conference's abstracts demonstrate the wide range of potential topics within the field of DGGs. Because the study and use of DGGs has deepened in scope and expanded beyond the disciplines represented at the first International Conference, we are pleased to announce the Second International Conference on Discrete Global Grids. This conference will provide opportunities to meet the researchers, application developers and commercial partners and to examine the latest DGG-based approaches, technologies and applications.

The conference will take place on the campus of Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon USA, during October 27-29, 2004. Ashland is the home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the premier cultural attractions in the United States.

The conference is being organized by a Program Committee made up of researchers from academia,government, and the private sector. The Program Committee is chaired by Ross Kiester (rkiester@gmail.com). Our intention is to produce a peer-reviewed proceedings from the conference.

As with the first conference, our aim is to assemble a program of the widest possible diversity linked to DGGs. Abstracts from the first conference are available here and demonstrate the range of topics that we are encouraging to be put forth for consideration. We encourage submissions from all researchers, developers and partners working with DGGs. Possible topic areas include (but are not limited to):

• Mathematics of DGGs. Lattices and groups on spheres, tessellations and the honeycomb conjecture, hierarchical DGGs and cellular automata on DGGs.
• Statistics of DGGs. Statistical models, sampling schemes and properties of spatial autocorrelation on tessellations.
• Cartography. Computing DGGs, evaluating alternative DGGs and transforming among different DGGs.
• Efficient spatial databases.
• General Circulation Models. (Climate modeling)
• Remote Sensing: (Interoperability of multiple sensors & binning data.)
• Environmental Science Applications.
• Demography, Epidemiology, Sociology and Economics Applications.
• Commercial Products

The deadline for submission of abstracts is July 15, 2004 (for more information see Presenter Information).

We invite you to join us in Ashland this fall!