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Department of Spatial Planning

PLATIAL'19 proceedings

PLATIAL'19 © René Westerholt and Franz-Benjamin Mocnik

In September last year, the Second International Symposium on Platial Information Science (PLATIAL'19) was held in Coventry (UK). This annual symposium is dedicated to place-based information science, whereby "place" (as opposed to space) is to be understood here as a mental construct of subjectively experienced and lived geographical environments. The symposium was conducted by Jun.-Prof. Dr René Westerholt (RAM, School of Spatial Planning) in cooperation with Dr Franz-Benjamin Mocnik (University of Twente, Netherlands). The motto of last year's event was "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Place", which aimed to build bridges between different disciplines represented in place-based spatial research. The accepted and presented contributions consequently covered a broad spectrum from human geography, cognitive science, psychology to more practical aspects of social media and cartography. The programme was complemented by two top-class and inspiring keynote lectures. One was given by Sir Nigel Thrift (University of Oxford, UK), on the influence of everyday technologies on the living, experiencing and practicing of places. Nigel Thrift is one of the most recognised and most cited human geographers and has given significant impulses to his discipline. A second keynote lecture was presented by Prof. Dr Thora Tenbrink (Bangor University, UK) on the topic "linguistic representation of lived places". The now published symposium proceedings contain all peer-reviewed and invited short papers in collected form. These papers shed light on the representation of places in information structures from various perspectives. While some contributions approach the topic from a cognitive science perspective, other contributors discuss the topic of place from a more analytical and computer science perspective. It is the combination of such different angles that allows a complete grasp and understanding of the topic discussed – and the PLATIAL symposium has provided essential impulses for this. The next event in the PLATIAL series will take place in September 2021 in Enschede (Netherlands). The symposium volume can be found online: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3628833.