WebGIS: More Than Just Maps - A New Paradigm for Delivering Geographic Information Services
Dr. Todd Bacastow, Assistant Director, EMS Environmental Institute, PennState
Most significant societal changes occur "in an environment that contained all the essential elements for change and to a mind prepared to recognize the possibility for change" (Elting Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 1966). The environment that contains the essential elements of a new marketplace that affords millions of people the power of an extraordinary suite of geospatial services is here. The purpose of this workshop is to prepare the attendee’s mind to recognize and take advantage of the possibilities. The workshop provides an integrated view of the essential technologies and the environment. The entry point to this new marketplace is through recent advances in WebGIS technologies and how it is demonstrating the possibilities of this new services market. The second enabling technology is the OpenGIS Specification which enables geoprocessing to become an integral part of the new distributed computing paradigm in which applets, middleware, components, e-commerce tools, catalogs, and object request brokers give any networked computing device easy real-time access to a huge universe of geodata and geoprocessing resources. Digital Earth is emerging in the public consciousness as the environment of this marketplace. In Digital Earth, private sector and public sector participants are creating an integrated framework to which they can share or market their services.

GIS and Remote Sensing for Economic Development
Martin Roche, Assistant Director, Research and Presentation Systems, South Carolina Department of Commerce

Applications of Remote Sensing for Local and Regional Use
Dr. W. Frederick Limp, Director, Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, University of Arkansas