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Foreword 
The international workshop on “New Developments on Geographic Information Systems” was 
held in Milan, Italy from 6-8 March, 1996. The workshop was sponsored by the International 
Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Working Group II/2 “Hardware and 
Software Aspects of GIS” and was hosted by the National Research Council of Italy and the 
Italian Remote Sensing Association. More than 50 participants attended the workshop with about 
30 oral and poster presentations. 25 (?) of these presentations are published in this workshop 
proceedings. A common theme to many of these presentation was the integration of spatial 
handling technologies such as GIS, remote sensing, modeling or GPS. 
The keynote lecture on the advances of the practical integration of GIS and remote sensing was 
presented by David Cowen (University of South Carolina, USA). Other invited papers were 
given by Werner Kuhn (Technical University of Vienna, Austria) on the evolution of standards in 
GIS and by Mark Gahegan (Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia) on the 
development of a single unified data model for GIS and remote sensing. 
The workshop sessions with presented papers were grouped into Database Management, 
Integrated GIS Modeling and Land Use Planning and Conservation. The papers on Database 
Management addressed theoretical concepts such as the object-oriented approach for the US 
Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) vector format databases and the design of federated databases 
for multi-level decision making. Other presentations were of more applied nature and discussed 
topics such as improving ground truthing for better GIS/remote sensing integration, GIS and 
remote sensing techniques for small-scale land cover product, and the structure of metadata in 
GIS. 
The role of GIS for data management, analysis and visualization within an integrated modeling 
environment was discussed in the session on Integrated GIS Modeling. The papers ranged from 
very applied case studies on ecological analysis of bird habitat and on saltmarsh development to 
modular integration scenarios with hydrological models, GIS and CAD to fuzzy knowledge based 
decision support systems, 3D techniques for landscape modeling and virtual GIS’s based on a set 
of universal spatial operators. 
The last session on Land Use Planning and Conservation brought an overview of Europe’s 
remote sensing activities, especially within the framework of the European Laboratories of 
Remote Sensing (EARSeL). Other topics included studies on using GIS, agricultural modeling 
and remote sensing for the assessment of land use on water quality, the use of multi-scale 
monitoring techniques for the prediction of island morphodynamics, and the possibilities for 
biotop mapping using Global Positioning (GPS) technology. 
The meeting was perfectly organized by Mario Gomarasca and his staff at CNR. They were 
responsible for a very pleasant and hospitable atmosphere. The gargantuesque workshop dinner 
will stay for ever in our minds. 
Jimmy Johnston, Natalie Gormanous, Belynda Begnaud, and Antonio Martucci at the U.S.