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.