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We are happy to announce a new European Journal of Geography (EJG) section titled ‘Geographic Insights in brief’. This initiative complements the new approach of EJG publishing (immediate publication of papers after the end of the review process) The short papers in this section will be published as part of each issue of the journal and will be reviewed only by the editorial team, in order to achieve fast dissemination of new and interesting ideas and applications. This section will accept two kinds of papers: First, papers announcing new ideas, breakthroughs and innovations in all Geographical areas that need to be immediately communicate to all geographers. The authors can later proceed to publish a fully developed traditional paper. Second, brief reports focusing on short, clear and pointed geographical research results and data. These shorter and more digestible items will help geographers to get a better understanding about specific spatial dimensions of environmental, social and economic phenomena and interactions that can feed an ongoing policy discussion with just a small amount of original visual analytics and geographical data. That is, present a smart and successive visualization or datasets, such as cartograms, mental maps, web-GIS platforms, real-time geographies and so on. This process provides new opportunities for intellectual communications and benefits for both researchers and practitioners to present new theoretical and empirical findings from new research and/or innovative geospatial applications. This new EJG section follows the trend in contemporary scholarship on geography to provide open access, inclusive and flexible platforms that express new, vibrant and exciting ideas. The requirements for the new series in EJG are: 1. Scope: European topics in human or physical geography, using cartography, GIS, remote sensing, quantitative or qualitative methods. 2. It includes one main idea or one research question, a reproducible method and one single map and up to two extra figures or/and tables. 3. It has an abstract of 100 words, three to six keywords and one or two research highlights. 4. It has a total word limit of around 1.000-2.000 words (including the main text, figures, tables and references). 5. Maps should comply with the usual cartographic and semiotic rules 6. Data and/or Code should be available on currently available repositories (e.g., Figshare, Mendeley data, Github, CRAN, Dataverse etc.) We welcome research contributions in the scientific fields of geography, planning, sociology, regional science, health, history, engineering, informatics, architecture. For any questions, please write to the editorial team (editor@eurogeojournal.eu) to discuss intended submissions.

As technology has become an agent of immense change, it has forced upon the education system Cloud Computing, which in the form of School on the Cloud will have significant future ripple effects. In moving from ground (present conditions) to Cloud (future conditions), there is a need to examine the educational enhancements and the future ramifications of this technology. The description of these effects represents the goal of this chapter, by reviewing the major aspects of the future of Cloud Based Education and by presenting the approach and the results of a foresight exercise, which have led to the development of a series of future scenarios related to the future roles of the major education stakeholders.

Technological advances have provided the opportunity to create entirely new learning environments. A major technological breakthrough that has sparked innovation to most human activities and has a huge potential to radically transform education is cloud computing. This chapter reports on a Delphi study focused on the current and future impact of Cloud computing and its applications on education. It first provides a background to the study through an overview of the Delphi technique. Next, it describes how Delphi was applied in two-round investigation aimed at collecting and systematically classifying the views and knowledge of three groups of stakeholders (‘experts') concerning the future of Cloud computing in education. The chapter then presents the major findings from the two rounds of the study. It ends with drawing of conclusions and recommendations regarding how to move ahead with the use of Cloud computing in education in European countries and beyond.

Geospatial challenges in the twenty-first century is an initiative of the European Association of Geographers (EUROGEO), addressing relevant topics in the wide field of geography, which connects the physical, human, environmental, and technological sciences to enhance teaching, research, and decision-making. In recent years, geography as a discipline has been changing due to several essential factors, in particular, thanks to the deployment of geospatial technologies. Thus, geography is also changing in the research methods, data collection, processing, and representation it uses. This chapter will try to answer three main relationships between geospatial technologies in geographical research: geospatial challenges and geographical problems, geospatial challenges and geographical skills, and geospatial challenges and geographical knowledge.

In order for the educational system to meet its future needs, several requirements must be fulfilled. There is a need to be an efficient and effective teaching and learning operating system, an appropriate to the future conditions teaching environment, an acceptable set of methodological tools and, because of these, a suitable classroom environment. These requirements represent the major components of the education paradigm been in effect every time, which, in the last few years, has shifted from the Individual/Traditional, to the Group/Progressive, and finally to the Community/School on the Cloud paradigm. In addition, changes in the components of each paradigm have resulted in changes in the corresponding school model, from the Traditional, to the Progressive and finally to the School on the Cloud model. The goal of this chapter is to present and evaluate all these shifts, which are of paramount importance to future teaching and learning.

This paper presents a linguistic approach for modeling urban growth. The authors developed a methodological framework which utilizes Fuzzy Set theory to capture and describe the effect of urban features on urban growth and applies Cellular Automata techniques to simulate urban growth. Although several approaches exist that combine Fuzzy Logic and Cellular Automata for urban growth modeling, the authors focused on the ability to use partial knowledge and combine theory-driven and data driven knowledge. To achieve this, a parallel connection between the input variables is introduced which further allows the model to disengage from severe data limitations. In this approach, a number of parallel fuzzy systems are used, each one of which focuses on different types of urban growth factors, different drivers or restrictions of development. The effects of all factors under consideration are merged into a single internal thematic layer that maps the suitability for urbanization for each area, providing thus an information flow familiar to the human conceptualization of the phenomenon. Following, cellular automata techniques are used to simulate urban growth. The proposed methodology is applied in the Mesogeia area in the Attica basin (Athens) for the period 1990-2004 and provides realistic estimations for urban growth.

In this paper we present a methodological framework designed to access urban growth dynamics and simulate urban growth. To do so, it utilizes the descriptive power of Fuzzy Logic and Fuzzy Algebra to map the effects of various parameters to the urban growth phenomenon and express them in comprehensible terms. Sensitive Sum, a new fuzzy operator is proposed to employ a parallel connection between the effects of separate variables while taking into account the (statistical) correlation between them. As a result, the model implements a reducible/extensible form of Knowledge Base which can include both data-driven and empirical rules and does not require certain variables/data to run. In order to simulate urban growth Cellular Automata techniques are incorporated that are enhanced by pseudo-agent behavior. The proposed model is applied in the broader Mesogia area in east Attica (Athens, Greece) for the period 2000–2007 during which urban land cover grew by 66% and appears to capture the urban growth dynamics occurred in a satisfactory way.