The initiation of the GIScience conference series came with the observation that the GIScience ?eld has a widely fragmented conference landscape. Many papers on geographic information science are presented not only at such specialized meetings as the biennial Conferences on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT), the Symposia on Spatial and Temporal databases (SSTD), the International Symposia on Spatial Accuracy, the Symposia on Spatial Data Handling (SDH), or the ACM Workshop on Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS), but also at the large meetings of the professional organizations that deal with - ographic information systems. The lack of an opportunity to exchange ideas across the disciplinary specializations led to the creation of the GIScience c- ference series as a forum for all GIScience researchers who are interested in the advances in research in the fundamental aspects of geographic information s- ence. The ?rst meeting was held in Savannah, Georgia, USA, in October 2000 (www. giscience. org/GIScience2000) with 120 paper presentations (selected from the submission of extended abstracts) and over 300 attendees.
GIScience 2002 in Boulder, Colorado, USA followed this highly successful inaugural meeting. Atrademarkoftheresearch?eldofgeographicinformationscienceisthed- ciplinary mixture of researchers contributing the advancement of our knowledge. One typically ?nds cognitive scientists, computer scientists, engineers, geog- phers,informationscientists,mathematicians,philosophers,psychologists,social scientists,andstatisticians. Ofcourse,thislistisneitherexhaustivenorexclusive. Acriticalaspectforthesuccessofthe?eldisthedialogamongtheseresearchers, becauseadvancesalongthemanyintersectionsofthecontributingdisciplinesare paramount for geographic information science, requiring the concurrent att- tionfromresearchersfrommultipledisciplines. TheGIScienceconferencesaimto serve as the disciplinary melting pot for geographic information science research.