In Italy we say “Your first love is never forgotten”. This applies also to conferences. The first event which I attended as my own business decision, and not because somebody told me was the 1997 edition of the ASITA national conference. ASITA is an association resulting from the joint venture of four national association focused on various aspects of spatial information and geomatics. 1997 was in Parma, at the trade centre. I went there from Cagliari, where I started working a few months before, and I immediately caught a cold, since I was getting used to Sardinian weather, but it was a great experience. The only thing I clearly remember, above a lot of background noise, was that some guys from one of the national research council’s institute were citing my PhD thesis in a poster where they were explaining that they had been re-applying my work. Cool!
I then remember attending Genova (2000), skipping almost all of the rest of the first decade of the third millennium for corporate commitments. Then I was in Bari (2009), Colorno (2011), and Florence (2014). I might say this is an intermittent, but not interrupted, relationship.
This year, sadly, I can’t make it to Lecco. I was thinking of proposing a workshop about BuioMetria Partecipativa, but then things didn’t work out…maybe next time. In the meantime, to have an idea of what will happen at the conference, I decided to re-apply to the final program of the event the algorithm which I used in June to analyze Pope Francis’ Encyclical letter.
If you check out the most frequent nouns, a possible way to read this is that there will be university folks from Milano and Torino, Marco, Andrea, Maria e Giuseppe who will convene to talk about management of data on their territories. This is, of course, a hyper-simplification. However, I am sure that perusing the top 100 of the nouns in the program, Italian GIS professionals will find interesting stuff here (always reminding about the working assumptions for the current version of the processing algorithm, which are explained in the June article on the encyclical letter).
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