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The Institute of Space and Earth Information Science (ISEIS) of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) successfully hosted the international conference on ‘Geo-Process Modeling in VGE: Managing and Sharing Geographic Knowledge’ recently.  Virtual geographic environments (VGE) is a new generation of geographic analysis platform evolved from maps and geographic information systems (GIS).  VGE can be used for geographic process mining, complex geographic problem solving, and geographic knowledge sharing in addition to geo-data sharing.  The conference aimed at providing facilitation and communication between experts from multidisciplinary domains to discuss issues about how to make full use of geo-process models for geographic knowledge discovery. 

Prof. Tung Fung, Associate Vice-President of CUHK delivered a welcome address at the opening ceremony, introducing the history of CUHK and the research focuses of ISEIS.  Professor Fung emphasized the outstanding contributions of ISEIS to the development of VGE. 

The honorary chairmen of the International Steering Committee of the conference were academician Guanhua Xu, former Minister of Ministry of Science and Technology, and Prof. Michael Batty, Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in the UK, while Academician Huadong Guo served as the chairman of the Programme Committee, Prof. Hui Lin, Director of ISEIS as the chairman of the Organizing Committee, and Dr. Min Chen of ISEIS as the Programme Coordinator. 

There were nine keynote addresses with 22 thematic presentations focusing on Geo-Processing modeling, development of VGE, geographic knowledge management and sharing.  Three panel discussions were held with topics of ‘What is the Ongoing Development in Geographic Process Modeling?’, ‘What Virtual World Can Contribute to Scientific Simulation?’ and ‘Bridge Geo-process Modelling and Virtual World for Naturally Research’.  Panelists and audiences from floor were strongly active to propose statements and had an inspiring discussion.  Mr. Mansour Raad, Senior Software Architect of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) was invited to give a pre-conference workshop to improve the participants’ cognition to Big-Data and its applications. 

More than 80 scholars and research students from different countries and regions including the US, the UK, Czech Republic, New Zealand, Bulgaria, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, took part in the event.  They included Prof. Sven Erik Jørgensen, President of International Society of Ecological Modelling (ISEM) and Academician of European Academy of Sciences, Prof. Bojie Fu and Prof. Jianya Gong, Academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Milan Konecny, Vice-president of the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE), Prof. Alexey Voinov, President of the International Environmental Modeling and Software Society, Prof. Temenoujka Bandrova, President of Bulgarian Cartographic Association, Prof. John Wilson, Chief Editor of the top journal Transactions in GIS, Prof. Paul M. Torrens from the University of Maryland, Prof. A-xing Zhu from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Prof. Huang-Hsung Hsu, Academician of Academia Sinica, and Prof. Yaning Chen, Director of the State key Lab of Desert and Oasis Ecology. 

Organizers:
Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, CUHK
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London 

Co-organizers:
National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, University at Buffalo
State Key Lab for Resource and Environment Information Systems, Chinese Academy of Sciences
State Key Lab of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University
Key Lab of Virtual Geographic Environment, Ministry of Education of PRC, Nanjing Normal University
Key Lab of Poyang Lake Wetland and Watershed Research, Ministry of Education of PRC, Jiangxi Normal University
Spatial Information Research Centre of Fujian, Fuzhou University 

Supporting Organizer:
Office of CUHK Jockey Club Initiative Gaia, Institute of Environment Energy and Sustainability, CUHK