It’s our pleasure to announce that the PNC 2008 Annual Conference in conjunction with ECAI (Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative) and JVGC (Japan-Vietnam Geoinfomatics Consortium) will be held in La Thanh Hotel, Ha Noi, Vietnam from December 4 to 6, 2008. The main theme for this year’s conference is “Information Technology for a Sustainable and Creative Humanosphere”.

Humanosphere is defined as the earth environment vital to the existence of humans. It includes the Geosphere and the Biosphere. In recent years, critical challenges such as climate change, dwindling of energy, food and water resources have put great pressure on the sustainability of the Humanosphere. These important issues have been studied by many cross-disciplinary research teams. The main theme for this Conference calls for inputs from the perspective of information technology on how our Community could help better understand these crucial issues.

In order to facilitate information exchanges among higher education institutions of Pacific Rim, PNC Annual Conference has been held in many countries over the past thirteen years, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mexico, Japan, Thailand, Hawaii, Korea, and United States. Through these Conferences, PNC witnessed the considerable impacts brought by the speedy changes of Internet Age and leading edge IT technology on Humanity Research. With the kind help of JVCG, efforts made by Vietnam Scholars Communities will be incorporated into PNC to co-construct the portal of e-Neighborhood and e-Scholarship. With the expansion to Vietnam, PNC is expected to move further in promoting interdisciplinary and international cooperation on the development and sharing of Digital Content in our region.

The session format on the PNC 2008 Annual Conference consists of oral presentation, and poster/computer demonstration covering various domains as follows:

	Cultural Atlases
	Digital Archive
	Digital Library (Academic Project)
	Digital Library (National and Commercial Projects)
	Digital Museum
	e-Learning
	e-Publishing
	e-Resource
	e-Science
	Gazetteers
	GIS
	Humanities GIS
	Intellectual Property Right
	International Digital Project Collaboration
	Metadata
	Open Source

You're more than welcome to join us! The conference information will soon be available in PNC website at http://www.PNCLink.org. Should you have any further questions regarding PNC 2008 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings, please contact PNC Secretariat at PNC@sinica.edu.tw.