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SEVEN INDIVIDUALS WON UCGIS AWARDS AND GRANTS
UCGIS issues
annual awards to The Researcher of the Year, Educator of the
Year, and Young Scholars (sponsored by
ESRI and
Intergraph). The
awardees are nominated by the broad UCGIS community and selected by the
Research, Education, and Sponsored Program committees, respectively. UCGIS
also receives grants from federal government agencies and private
organizations. The Research Projects Committee selects recipients of these
grants. All of these awards will be formally announced at the UCGIS
Assembly.
UCGIS Researcher of the Year
The University Consortium for Geographic
Information Science (UCGIS) Research Award is given to the creators of a
particularly outstanding research contribution to Geographic Information
Science. Normally the Research Award is awarded to author(s) of an
outstanding research work or series of works published in a peer-reviewed
medium. The committee will also consider other modes of expression of
research results, including patents, software packages, and non-refereed
publications. All researchers worldwide are eligible for the award, except
for the current members of the Research Award Committee. However, only
people affiliated with UCGIS member institutions may make official
nominations or serve on the Research Award Committee.
 The
recipient of the 2004 UCGIS Research Award is
Professor
David Mark, Department
of Geography, State University of New
York at Buffalo. David is an outstanding researcher in geographic
information science. His work has been at the forefront of the advances in
GIScience since the inception of this field, and has had a huge impact on
the GIScience research community in general. His pioneering work on
cognitive and linguistic aspects of spatial relations marked the beginning
of a new era in GIScience research, going way beyond the
then-state-of-the-art. His 1989 AutoCarto paper "Concepts of Space and
Spatial Language" and his subsequent leadership in the organization of the
NATO ASI at Las Navas in 1990 formed an entire sub-discipline within
geographic information science, which is represented by the highly
successful COSIT conference series. In addition, David introduced to GIS
research the notion of an experimental component through his seminal work
on human subject testing of spatial relations and reinforced such an
approach to GIScience research later through his work on geo-ontologies.
The latter theme has certainly been among the most prominent threads in
GIScience research during the past decade.
As a true believer in interdisciplinary research, David has fully embraced
the advancement of knowledge through intense and sustained collaboration
with linguists, psychologists, philosophers and others across disciplinary
boundaries. At the same time as ontologies have emerged as an important
topic within the semantic web community, David has steadfastly pursued the
study of ontologies in the geographic domain from a cross-cultural and
cross-linguistic aspect, aiming for a more deeply-rooted understanding of
the semantics of terms typically used for describing geographic phenomena.
It is in this domain, that David Mark has made
numerous and high-quality contributions to the GIScience research
literature, particularly during the past half-dozen years. This
contribution is exemplary and fully deserves the 2004 UCGIS Research
Award.
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