Dr. Nguyen Van Hieu , Vice Director of International Training and Development Center and the Advanced Education Program of Thai Nguyen University of Agriculture and Forestry invited Prof. Lin Hui – Director of Institute of Space and Earth Information Science of the Chinese University of Hong Kong to deliver a seminar last May 29, 2015. The speaker talked about the maps, Geographical Information System (GIS) and Virtual Geographic Environment (VGE) – the evolution of geographic language. K44 students of the Advanced Education Program participated in. The discussion was about predicting the future by means of visualizing it with the aid of VGE technology, creating a virtual world, countries, regions down to cities. Nowadays these techniques are being used as a tool to model or simulate the phenomenon that can happen before it actually occur in real situation such as natural disasters due to the continuous changing of climate. This makes the VGE technology as one of the solutions to mitigate climate change impacts. VGE consist of data management that offers knowledge sharing which will become a very effective way to simulate the occurrence of natural hazards for the better risks management and in order to have more preventive measures to avoid catastrophic events.

The information from the data base plus all the visualization making the VGE technique an essential tool for environment protection and management and other important issues the society is facing nowadays. Professor Lin Hui pointed out that people from different parts of the world can work together even they are not physically present in one single place provided that VGE can generate environment that will connect the real and virtual world and indeed a very powerful mechanism to support for positive sustainable development which includes consideration of  all environment, economy and society – how effective this technique can be used for growth and development in many areas across the globe.

With VGE, experts can create virtual maps of the country, region down to cities – this can be a great way to develop many areas of the society such as tourism and environmental protection and management. From a very simple maps drawn manually to digital maps then becoming virtual ones. The information is acquired from data sharing up to the next level of knowledge sharing.

Now we step into a new age , VGE indicates new generation of scientific experiments and analysis with virtual space by visualizing how scientific ideas can change the world in all the areas it can enhance such as Environment Impact Analysis, Environment Management , Water Resources Management, Regional and Urban Planning and Flood Management as well. Now and in the future, VGE will offer answers to solve many of the challenges the world is facing nowadays by means of being one of the essential tool for decision making of scientists, policy makers and stakeholders.

Professor Lin Hui told students of Advanced Education Program that he is looking forward having the contribution of students to their journal – Annals of GIS.

Jimlea, K44 Student