OSGeo
- the Open Source Geospatial Foundation- A foundation to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led open source geospatial software projects, and other related endeavors.
- Created February 2006, it publishes a journal and holds a conference, FOSS4G
- FOSS4G 2006: Lausanne, Switzerland
- FOSS4G 2007: Victoria, BC
- : Cape Town, South Africa
- Held in Malta, May 21 - 22, 2009
- Topics: "Digital Landscape Design for the Mediterranean Islands,
Landscape Information Models LIMs, 3D, 4D and VR Landscape
Visualization, Teaching Digital Landscape Architecture, Knowledge Based
Landscape Architecture, 3D-Workmethod in Landscape Design"
- Administered by Olaf Schroth, with emphasis on the "landscape" side of terrain visualization
International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE)
- Although the US "digital earth" initiative of the 1990s lost momentum around 2001 (see Government Projects) it did lead to a series of interesting international conventions.
- As of 2007, there is now a single site for the organization, as http://www.digitalearth-isde.org/
- Conferences:
- 1st ISDE conference was 1999 in Beijing China
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2nd 2001 in Fredericton
Canada, "Beyond the Infrastructure” - 3rd 2003 in Brno Czech Republic, “Information Resources for Global Sustainability”
- 4th 2005 in Tokyo Japan, "Digital Earth as a Global Commons”
- Digital Earth Summit, August 2006 in Auckland, New Zealand (http://www.digitalearth.org.nz/ apparently gone as of 2008)
- 5th 2007 in San Francisco USA, "Bringing Digital Earth Down to Earth"
- Journal:
- News and discussion site, a "Slashdot for GIS and Remote Sensing".
- It doesn't get much traffic, but the quality of the news is good.
- An organization which "seeks to address concerns and issues with the use of Virtual Reality technologies and provides a foundation for integrating together the human, technological and strategic aspects of VR under the umbrella of international exchange, cooperation and development".
- They hold an annual conference, e.g. VSMM 2004, VSMM 2005
- Of greatest interest is their Virtual Heritage Network ("Organization for the use of technology in Cultural Heritage") which focuses on archaeology and technologies which overlap with terrain modeling as described on this site.
- The first conference (3DGeoInfo'06)
was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 7-8 August 2006
- There are many papers on 3D GIS, urban visualization and related subjects. The proceedings are available as 'Innovations in 3D Geoinformation Science' (ISBN 3-540-36997-X). It is a massive hardcover book, 760 pages with 438 illustrations. It can be purchased from amazon.com or from springer.de (€170).
- Next was 3Dgeoinfo07: Delft,
Netherlands, 12-14 December 2007
- Full title: 2nd International Workshop on 3D Geo-Information: Requirements, Acquisition, Modelling, Analysis, Visualisation
- The next event after that will be in Hong Kong in 2008.
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The
Image Society- a technical, non-profit, professional association whose purpose is the technological advancement of real-time visual simulation, related VR technologies, and their applications, primarily by means of an annual conferences with papers
- deals with a lot of terrain-related companies and technologies, mostly "Vis Sim", i.e. aerospace/military
- For many years, vis-sim.org was a great place vis-sim industry news and gossip, but it shut down in June 2003. Numerous sites have sprung up in its wake.
- modsim.org
- news portal for "the Visual Simulation & Modeling Industry", begun December 2003
- A central depository for "virtual globe" related links. The term seems to mean terrain visualization at the global level. They had a blog, but it's offline as of 2007.
- It's not clear how it relates to another popular blog of the same name, Geography 2.0: Virtual Globes.
- a collection of pages that describe recent developments in the geographical sciences in the general area of urban simulation and geocomputation
- virtual-terrain relevant section, 3D visualization in urban planning and geosimulation
- a news portal primarily for GIS, but increasingly covering terrain visualization subjects as well
- First International Workshop on Next Generation 3D City Models Bonn, Germany | 21-22 June 2005. It covered many virtual terrain subjects, see the papers in the program.
- Bi-annual conference which published many papers overlapping the field of virtual terrain
- 1997 (Bombay) 1999 (Venice), 2001 (Manoa/Honolulu), 2003 (Sendai), 2005 (UCL London)
- CUPUM seems to be little-known outside of a narrow band of people; those in the visualization fields and even most of those in urban planning haven't heard of it!