The program has just been released for one of the biggest spatial and surveying events to reach Australian shores. Spanning four days from 3-6 April, the Locate Conference and Digital Earth Symposium will be held at the newly re-opened Sydney International Convention Centre (pictured above).
Among the soon-to-be-announced program highlights is a panel discussion by the Surveyor Generals of the various states and territories of Australia, as well as international presentations from the likes of what3words, Esri, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Oracle, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and universities and research institutes the world over.
So diverse are the applications of location information that the two main conference days, Wednesday and Thursday, will be split into no less than eight separate streams. Among the streams are the following topics- each of them allocated with an impressive collection of local and international speakers:
- Land Surveying & Administration
- Open Data & Government
- Big Data
- Smart Cities
- Intelligent Transport
- Smart Sensors for Natural Resource Management
- Spatial Infrastructure
- Virtual Globes
On Wednesday 5th April 2017, a number of government delegates will formally open the conference. Introductions from the President of the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE), the Chairman of SIBA and the President of SSSI will be followed by a series of plenaries.
Among them will be Greg Scott, Advisor for Global Geospatial Information Management for the UN; Walter Scott, DigitalGlobe’s founder; Peter Woodgate of CRCSI, Glenn Cockerton of Spatial Vision and Guo Huadong, from the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth at Chinese Academy of Sciences. From there, the program splits into eight complete streams – sure to satisfy all tastes and levels of expertise.
On the Thursday, further plenaries will be delivered by Steven Ramage of GEO, Alessandro Annoni of the European Union’s Joint Research Center in Italy, and a number of guests yet to be announced.
The APSEA awards night at Locate16. Photograph by Chris Hopkins
In the two days leading up to the Wednesday, there will also be networking events, workshops, a VIP cocktail function, and major meetings for the likes of ANZLIC, ISDE and The United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM). The annual Asia Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards this year will be coupled with the ISDE Awards on the evening of Wednesday 5 April.
To see the program in full, please refer to the Locate conference website, where the program is soon to be published.
As a first time dual-event, the introduction of the Digital Earth Symposium to Locate is expected to add a host of international delegates to what is already Australia’s preeminent spatial and surveying event. Estimates of the delegate numbers weigh in at about 800 and a growing list of sponsors and exhibitors include major satellite imagery suppliers, software vendors and local surveying instrument suppliers alike.
