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Workshop on platial analysis (PLATIAL'18)

The concept of 'place' is about to become one of the major research themes in the interdisciplinary field of geographical information science (GIScience), as well as in adjoining fields. Briefly put, while locations provide objective references (e.g., point coordinates), places are the units utilized by humans to approach the geographic world. On the one hand, the current 'platial turn' is caused by the plethora of particularly urban geographic datasets that have become available in the last years, many of which are user-generated (e.g., geosocial media feeds). These so-called ambient geospatial datasets mirror small and limited glimpses of the everyday lives of people and how these approach and experience the geographic world into the digital sphere. Ambient geographic datasets may thus be understood as something deeper than just mere 'attributes referenced over point locations', which is why they have recently been conjectured to be of platial rather than of spatial nature. 'Platial' can hereby be understood as the place-based counterpart to the space-based adjective 'spatial'.