This special issue originated from a workshop held in Holden, Maine in November 2002 on the topic of event-oriented approaches for geographic information science. Following the workshop, a call for papers was distributed, resulting in nine papers being submitted for review. Four of these papers appear in this special issue and cover:
*events performed by humans from the psychological perspective;
*information services that must guide users through a set of decision points that are based on ontologies that typically do not capture dynamic aspects, such as events and actions;
*"multiaspect" phenomena, such as floods and wildfires, that are not adequately and separately describable either as dynamic objects or as spatiotemporal fields; and
*the foundations for ontologies of the dynamic world in which snapshot views of the world at a single time and happenings over time have an equal but complementary status.