The 8th edition of the International Symposium on Web and Wireless Geograp- cal Information Systems (W2GIS 2008) was held in December 2008, in the vibrant city of Shanghai, China. This annual symposium aims at providing a forum for discussing advances on recent developments and research results in the field of Web and wireless geographical information systems. Promoted from workshop to s- posium in 2005, W2GIS now represents a prestigious event within this dynamic research community. These proceedings contain the papers selected for presen- tion at this international event. For the 2008 edition, we received 38 submissions from 16 countries. All subm- ted papers were related to topics of interest to the symposium. Each paper received three reviews. Based on these reviews, 14 papers were selected for presentation and inclusion in the proceedings. The accepted papers are all of excellent quality and cover topics that range from mobile networks and location-based services, to contextual representation and mapping, to geospatial Web techniques, to object tracking in Web and mobile environments. We wish to thank all authors that contributed to this symposium for the high quality of their papers and presentations. Our sincere thanks go to Springer’s LNCS team. We would also like to acknowledge and thank the Program C- mittee members for the quality and timeliness of their reviews. Finally, many thanks to the Steering Committee members for providing continuous support and advice.