Introduction to the PLATIAL'18 Workshop on Platial Analysis

The concept of “place” is about to become one of the major research themes in the discipline 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. The PLATIAL’18 workshop makes a significant contribution towards establishing a notion of place and is meant to be the starting point for a series of future events. What sets this workshop apart from others dealing with the concept of place is that the focus is decisively on its quantitative investigation and conceptual formalization. The workshop accommodates a wide range of aspects all of which in one or another way are related to the two outlined core foci. This is well reflected by the various topical sessions into which the workshop has been organized. These include “Conceptual Anatomy of Place”, “Disclosing Places from Human Discourse”, “Bridging Space and Place”, and “Exploratory and Visual Analytics of Place”. The content sessions were concomitantly inspired by two keynote talks by Alexis Comber (University of Leeds) and Clare Davies (University of Winchester)