Intelligent Spatial Decision Analysis (ISDA ’10)
http://www.unibas.it/utenti/murgante/isda_10/ISDA.html

in conjunction with

International Symposium on Intelligent Decision Technologies (IDT’10)

InnerHarbor, Baltimore, Maryland, USA 28-30 July 2010
http://idt-10.kesinternational.org/

Workshop Description
Within the study on decision-making essence and its links with some strictly related concepts as evaluation and choice, it is possible to state that whereas decision can be mostly considered as a “political” process, evaluation mainly includes technical issues, while choice induces both sides problems.

• Evaluation concerns an initial phase of a cognitive process and the decision terms of reference defining the boundaries within which the entire process takes place and the evaluation purposes are defined.
• Decision is a deliberative act which temporarily closes a long and predominantly political process where the relationship among individuals of a community (and therefore among contrasting interests) needs to be regulated.
• Choice ends an evaluation process which aims to select a decisional alternative among many ones, on the base of different and often conflictual criteria and points of view. So it reminds the necessity to screen and compare many alternatives and to make a selection.

How does Information Technology application in spatial analysis modify the way of making decisions? Decision Theory based its fundamentals on limited sets of solution and evaluation criteria for a long time, but the way of describing spatial issues of governance, characters and constraints of physical space shows a further complexity that can not be described without the use of new methods, in order to increase decision quality. Even if the core nature of decision approach still remains the same, the number of complexities connected within the process increases rapidly. The interaction among evaluation methods, and the new described complexity of the physical urban space create a new era for spatial decision support involving several disciplines, and domains of knowledge.

In relation to what above, a decision process necessarily involves the existence of several social actors, usually called “stakeholders”, contributing to the final choice definition and enforcement; it is therefore important to stress the distinction between decision making and decision aiding, sometimes wrongly adopted as synonyms. While a decision maker is the subject able, at the same time, to give the knowledge and to have the responsibility to make a choice, a decision aiding context involves the existence of two distinctive subjects at least: the analyst (or a group of them) aiding the decision via a deep scientific knowledge and the client (public or private) to whom such support is directed. Therefore, in the first case the following elements are usually considered: a well defined set of possible decisional alternatives, a well defined preference system already clear in the decision maker mind and a correctly formulated mathematical problem. A decision! aiding approach implies a set of not necessary stable potential actions compared on the base of n criteria able to reflect, under a natural uncertainty, the social actor preferences; in this case, then, a well formalized mathematical problem is quite impossible. In this context Intelligent Spatial Analysis Systems represent a fundamental support to decision making processes in conformity with a double reading perspective:

1. they comprise a coherent set of methods and techniques which enable to deepen the investigation on the scientific aspect of decision making process, adopting several rigorous tools and models belonging to different fields as machine learning (i.e. cellular automata, multi-agent systems, Bayesian networks, artificial neural networks, etc.), geostatistics (i.e. kernel methods, kriging, support vector machines, etc.), remote sensing, spatial data warehousing and Spatial OLAP, and spatial data mining;
2. they represent an innovative mean to enhance and guarantee participation (i.e. spatial multicriteria decision aiding, electronic meetings, focus groups, etc.), consensus building and communicability consensus building and communicability of decision making scenarios among stakeholders, in order to reach a transparent and accepted final choice.

The aim of the workshop is to investigate such connections among disciplines, by theoretical debates and tales on case studies.

The programme committee especially requests high quality submissions on the following Conference Themes :

• Decision Support Theory;
• Spatial Multicriteria Decision Analysis;
• Spatial Rough Set;
• Spatial extension of Fuzzy Set theory;
• Ontologies for Spatial Analysis;
• Environmental data mining;
• Learning from geospatial data;
• Machine Learning and Geostatistics;
• Artificial neural networks;
• Web-based decision analysis tools;
• Wireless Sensor Networks for Spatial Apllications
• Ant-based Algorithms;
• Cellular automata;
• Bayesian reasoning;
• Statistical learning theory: support vector machines, kernel methods;
• Remote sensing and remote sensed image processing;
• Geographical approach to risk analysis;
• Spatial Data warehousing foundations and architectures;
• Spatial Data extraction, cleaning, and loading;
• Spatial Multidimensional modeling and queries;
• Spatial OLAP visualization;
• New Spatial OLAP applications;
• Spatial OLAP as support for intelligent spatial analysis (data mining, multi-criteria, etc…);
• Spatial data mining: algorithms and visualization;
• New spatial data mining applications;
• Coupling spatial data mining and Spatial OLAP;
• Geovisual analytics, geovisualisation, visual exploratory data analysis;
• Visualisation and modelling of track data.

Authors Guideline
Please adhere strictly to the formatting provided in the template to prepare your paper and refrain from modifying it.
For formatting information, see the publisher’s web site
( http://www.springer.com/authors/book+authors?SGWID=0-154102-12-417900-0 ).

Papers should not exceed 10 pages in Springer format. Papers longer than this will be subject to an additional charge. Shorter papers will be acceptable if they adequately convey the material to be described, and are not so short as to be trivial or lacking in depth.

Submission
Papers for review for the conference must be submitted electronically in PDF form using the PROSE online submission and review system access.

You may submit a paper to “Intelligent Spatial Decision Analysis” Session selecting the session from a drop-down box when you submit the paper. Please ensure you select the correct session.

If you wish to submit a paper to an Invited Session, and the session is not shown on the drop-down box, please wait until the session has been set up.

Once the paper has been submitted you may check its progress by login in to the PROSE review system using the login details you have been supplied with ( http://idt-10.kesinternational.org/prose.php).

Proceedings
Accepted papers will be published by prestigious publishing house, Springer Verlag, as book chapters in a volume of their Engineering Series and indexed in ISI conference publications, EI, INSPEC, etc.

Outstanding papers will be invited to a submission in two special issues:

• Intelligent Decision Technologies Journal ( http://idt-journal.kesinternational.org/).
• Journal of Decision Systems (http://jds.revuesonline.com/ ).

Important dates

2 March 2010: Deadline for full paper submission
22 March 2010: Notification of acceptance
19 April 2010: Deadline for Camera Ready Papers
28-30 July 2010: ISDA ’10 (IDT’10) Conference