Highlights on ACM HPDGIS 2011: the Second International ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on High Performance and Distributed Geographic Information Systems (HPDGIS) 2011: (Chicago, Illinois - November 1, 2011)

The ACM SIGSPATIAL HPDGIS 2011 workshop was held in Chicago, Illinois, USA on November 1, 2011 in conjunction with the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information System, and was a great success. High performance computing and distributed systems have become prominent elements in the landscape of communication, computing, and information technologies due to the increasingly computationally and data intensive nature of geospatial problems in numerous fields and significant requirements for service-oriented computing and collaborative problem solving. Efficient handling of massive spatial databases, shared and role-based access to distributed data, and high-end computing services are fundamental to the real-time and near-real-time responses required by many GIS and associated decision support applications. The second international ACM SIGSPATIAL HPDGIS workshop was hence designed to bring together researchers and practitioners to map out the fundamental research areas centered on advances in high performance computing, distributed systems, and their applications to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis. The primary objective of the workshop series is to provide an overarching forum in which participants discuss the state-of- the-art, share research progress and activities, and establish future directions for research and education in HPDGIS.