SVG Open 2005 Conference and Exhibition - News

	Conference and Exhibition 4^th Annual Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics

Wireless Internet facilities & CampusLBS
	All participants of SVG Open 2005 will have free access to the UT Wireless Campus: Spread over the 140 hectare campus 650 access points have been installed, making it Europe's largest uniform wireless hotspot. Anyone with a PC, laptop, PDA or other WiFi enabled device can access the university's network and the internet from any building, the campus park and other facilities without cabling. SVG Open 2005 will also feature the offical launch of the Wireless CampusLBS. This project, started last spring, aims to provide Location Based Services (LBS) for the UT campus population. The Wireless Campus LBS is intended to serve as a testbed for research as well as to benefit from outcomes of research. The research includes looking into wireless LAN positioning techniques, context awareness of ubiquitous data management systems, and adaptive, task-oriented delivery of mapping information. SVG Open 2005 will be the first testcase for CampusLBS, providing all participants with an LBS to help them navigate the conference locations and locate fellow attendants. Read more about CampusLBS in the 1 page executive summary (15 Kb PDF) or the full paper (399 Kb PDF).

Vectoreal sponsorship : Commercial Track
	Vectoreal is sponsoring and helping organize the commercial presentation track. The aim is to provide a venue for companies to promote their services to the appropriate audience with a focus on product introduction and demonstration and on offers of services. The commercial track will run parallel to the 'normal' parallel sessions of the conference, using the available conference facilities. Vectoreal invites all commercial vendors who wish to participate to register at http://www.vectoreal.com/svgopen2005/commercialtrack/comtrack.html

Vectoreal sponsorship : Student Awards
	Together with our main sponsor Vectoreal student awards are made available for 1-3 students or other worthy candidates, who have a financial need for funding. Vectoreal will sponsor travel and accommodations costs. Application handling and awarding will be by Vectoreal, applications can come from already accepted speakers or other candidates that are found of appropriate quality by Vectoreal. Go to http://www.vectoreal.com/svgopen2005/sponsorship/students.html to apply. SVGopen2005 will provide free conference access and a conference dinner ticket, to a maximum of 3 receivers of a Vectoreal student sponsorship.

Course Preferences
	May 30^th, 2005 If you have registered for the courses at the first day of the conference we would kindly like to ask you to provide your preferences as to which courses you would like to attend. This will help us in planning the rooms for the courses. You can do this by logging in to 'your home'. If you have registered for the courses a new item 'Change course preferences' will appear, allowing you to submit your preferences.

News on a separate page
	May 2^nd, 2005 All the news is now available from our news page. Only the latest news item will appear on this page from now on. Older news items will remain available on the news page.

Preliminary schedule available
	April 22^nd, 2005 A preliminary conference schedule is now available. This is still likely to change somewhat and not all details are filled in yet. In particular one or two commercial tracks may be added later, as well as the courses and workshops.

Reviews and grades
	April 12^th, 2005 We received a lot of questions today about reviews for rejected papers. First off: let us say that the quality of the abstracts submitted was high. So high in fact that most papers we had to reject were good enough in itself, but we simply did not have the room to fit them in the program. Therefore we had no choice but to only accept papers that were graded a 'must have on the program' or 'should have on the program'. Normally the back-end system doesn't show the review comments for rejected papers, but since the number of papers that were graded 'Rejected' was very low, we decided to modify the back-end to show the reviews for the papers that unfortunately couldn't make it. Please keep in mind that only the main author can see whether a paper is accepted or rejected and the review comments, if you're a co-author please contact the main author directly.

Notification of acceptance ready
	April 12^th, 2005 We would like inform you that we have now reviewed all the abstracts. We have received 99 abstracts of which 69 were accepted, that means an acceptance rate of 70%. Please visit your personal account on the conference web site to check if your abstract has been accepted or unfortunately rejected. Please note that accepted papers are only included in the final programme if one of the authors is registered to and has paid for the conference. if you want someone else than the primary author to be the presenter then please let us know. We can then make sure that the right person pays the lower presenter registration fee. Early bird registration is possible until June 1. We now welcome you to submit your final paper before June 1. Please take the suggestions for improvement of the reviewers into account when writing your paper. Note that comments from the reviewers are provided only if the reviewers had specific suggestions for the preparation of the final paper. A tentative program will be available soon, and we hope it will inspire you even more to write your final paper! We have made a block reservation in several nearby hotels in different price ranges. All hotels, their locations and characteristics, are outlined on the conference web site. For most of the hotels you can use online registration forms that are linked from the location page for your convenience.

Notification of acceptance delayed
	March 30^th, 2005 The notifications of acceptance will unfortunately be delayed; due to the large number of submissions and because we want to make sure that the final program is interesting and of a high quality. Reviews are well under way at the moment, we expect that by Wednesday April 13th we can send out the notifications of acceptance (and unfortunately of rejections as well). A day or two after sending out the notifications a tentative program will be posted on this site.

Registration now open
	March 23^rd, 2005 Registration for the SVG Open 2005 Conference and Exhibition is now opened. To register go to 'your home', and login (create an account if you don't have one yet). Then choose the link below the new 'Registration' heading to register (or change your registration) for SVG Open 2005. Payment is done using PayPal, but you can also pay with a credit card without the need to create a PayPal account.

Good collection of abstracts received
	March 2^nd, 2005 We are very happy to announce that we have received an interesting collection of abstracts before the deadline. Thank you all for the promise this brings. We will now start the review process and hope we can send a notification of acceptance to a lot of people! If you couldn't quite make it on time: you can still submit, even though the deadline has passed, but of course submits from before the deadline go first! The later you submit the less we can promise, since we also have to decide on how many presentations will be held in parallel and the number of slots to use, as well as getting a head start with the proceedings.

Sponsor or Exhibitor
	February 10^th, 2005 Did you know your company can register for an exhibition booth at, or act as a sponsor for, SVG Open 2005? Just go to your home and click on 'add exhibitor' or 'add sponsor'. You can also use the animated banner above or the logo of our site to make SVG Open 2005 known to an even larger audience!

Pricing Information
	January 28^th, 2005 Information on pricing is available on the registration page. Registration itself is not enabled yet.

Deadline extended
	January 28^th, 2005 The deadline for submitting abstracts has been extended to March 1^st. We hope this will give even more people a chance to submit an abstract or proposals for a course.

Happy new year
	January 12^th, 2005 First of all a happy new year to all! We hope it will be a productive year for all of the SVG community! Second: Due to the relocation of the e-mail server we use for the website e-mails some functionality will be unavailable from January 12^th onwards (and will result in error messages, so please don't be alarmed). We hope to have it back online before monday the 17^th. We already received a number of interesting abstracts, please keep them coming!

Submissions possible
	December 14^th, 2004 Submitting abstracts, registering for presenting courses or panel discussions as wel as registering sponsors is now possible. Please see the Call for Participation page for more information.

Informational mailing list
	December 12^th, 2004 A new mailing list is available. We will use this mailing list to send out news about the conference and notices when the site has changed. Please don't send questions to this mailing list, we want to use it as an informational service for people who subscribe to it. For question please send an e-mail to svgopen2005_at_telin.nl (replacing the _at_ in the address with the @ sign).

SVG Open 2005 will take place in Enschede, NL
	After Zürich, Vancouver, and Tokyo, SVGopen 2005 will take place in Enschede, the Netherlands, from August 15 to 18, 2005. The conference on Scalable Vector Graphics, the computer graphics format of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), will show the versatility of this 'HTML of graphics'. Subjects can vary from specialized technical visualisations, to interactive multi-media art on your mobile phone or website. Besides paper presentations the program features courses, and both beginner and advanced level workshops. The conference offers ample opportunity to get to know people from the SVG community. SVGopen 2005 is organised by the University of Twente (UT), the Telematica Instituut, and the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC).