Andrew U. Frank

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Andrew U. Frank
Born (1948-02-03) February 3, 1948 (age 76)
Bern, Switzerland
Other namesAndré Frank
CitizenshipSwiss
Austrian
Alma mater ETH Zurich (Dipl.Ing.)
ETH Zurich (Ph.D.)
OccupationProfessor of Geoinformation
Website Andrew U. Frank's homepage

Andrew U. Frank (born February 3, 1948) was a Swiss-Austrian professor for geoinformation at Vienna University of Technology from 1992 until 2016. Previously he was Professor at the University of Maine at Orono. Frank was recognized for his achievements in the fields of spatial information theory, spatial database theory, and ontology in GIS in a special section in his honor in IJGIS.

Contents

Career

He established a theory based course in Geographic Information Science in 1982 at the University of Maine at Orono and was the lead for the Maine participation in the winning proposal for the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis where he served from 1988 onwards as Associate Director and lead the operations at University of Maine. [1] In 1992 he was appointed to the chair in Geoinformation at Vienna University of Technology. In 2016 he became emeritus professor at the same institution. [2]

Education

Scholarship

Data storage and query languages for Geographic Data

The results of Frank's Ph.D. thesis [3] were published in 1981 as "Application of DBMS to land information systems" [4] in the Very Large Database Conference and in the following year as "MAPQUERY: Data Base Query Language for Retrieval of Geometric Data and their Graphical Representation". [5] From this line of research resulted eventually "Towards a Spatial Query Language: User Interface Considerations" [6] (with Max J. Egenhofer) published 1988 again in VLDB and the DE-9IM standard.

Spatial Theory and Spatial Languages

He organized with David M. Mark the NATO financed conference "Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space" [7] in Las Navas del Marqués.

He published two articles "Qualitative spatial reasoning about distances and directions in geographic space" [8] and "Qualitative spatial reasoning: Cardinal directions as an example". [9]

Ontology for GIS

Together with Sabine Timpf he published "Multiple representations for cartographic objects in a multi-scale tree—An intelligent graphical zoom" [10] and refined the ideas to "Tiers of ontology and consistency constraints in geographical information systems". [11] With Peter A. Burrough he edited a book collecting contributions on "Geographic Objects with Indeterminate Boundaries". [12]

Land Tenure

Andrew Frank was involved in a number of international cadastral projects, most importantly a project funded by the U.S. AID to introduce a cadastre in Ecuador.

Advisees

Andrew Frank "has supervised nearly 40 PhD students, many of whom are now leaders in GIScience", [13] among others:

Further Ph.D. students of the recent years include:

Frank guided through habilitation:

Services

Andrew Frank was one of the initial team to bring together the winning proposal for the 1988 award to the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, under the lead of David S. Simonnet and together with Mike Goodchild, Ross McKinnon, David M. Mark and others. He served as Associate Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and lead the operations at the University of Maine.

In 1992 he organized the Conference on Spatial Information Theory in Pisa, known as COSIT 0 [18] and then the first COSIT in 1993 on the Island of Elba. This conference has been continued as a biannual meeting with proceedings published by Springer in LNCS. [19]

At the Vienna University of Technology he served as head of the institute for Geoinformation till it merged into the new department of Geodesy and Geoinformation. He was deputy to the chair of the senate of the Vienna University of Technology from 2013 till 2016. [20]

He served on the editorial board of several Journals in his field:

Honors

Related Research Articles

A Doctor of Science is a science doctorate awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. In some countries, a Doctor of Science is the degree used for the standard doctorate in the sciences; elsewhere a Doctor of Science is a "higher doctorate" awarded in recognition of a substantial and sustained contribution to scientific knowledge beyond that required for a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TU Wien</span> University in Vienna, Austria

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The National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) was founded in 1988 and hosted at three member campuses: The University of California, Santa Barbara; the State University of New York at Buffalo; and the University of Maine.

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References

  1. ↑ "Curriculum Vitae". TU Wien. Retrieved 27 January 2016.
  2. ↑ Mitteilungsblatt der TU Wien 15. Juni 2016
  3. 1 2 Andrew U. Frank. "Datenstrukturen für Landinformationssysteme - Semantische, topologische und räumliche Beziehungen in Daten der Geo-Wissenschaften" (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). ETH Zurich.[ permanent dead link ]
  4. ↑ Andrew U. Frank (1981), "Application of DBMS to land information systems", Very Large Database Conference (VLDB)
  5. ↑ Andrew U. Frank (1982), "MAPQUERY: Data Base Query Language for Retrieval of Geometric Data and their Graphical Representation", Journal of Computer Graphics, 16 (3): 199–207, doi: 10.1145/965145.801281 , S2CID   251672166
  6. ↑ Max J. Egenhofer; Andrew U. Frank (1988), "Towards a Spatial Query Language: User Interface Considerations", Journal of Computer Graphics, 88: 124–133
  7. ↑ Martin Raubal; David M. Mark; Andrew U. Frank (eds.), Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space, Kluver
  8. ↑ Andrew U. Frank (1992), "Qualitative spatial reasoning about distances and directions in geographic space", Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 3 (4): 343–371, doi:10.1016/1045-926X(92)90007-9
  9. ↑ Andrew U. Frank (1996), "Qualitative spatial reasoning: Cardinal directions as an example", International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 10 (3): 269–290, doi:10.1080/02693799608902079, S2CID   16646139
  10. ↑ Andrew U. Frank; Sabine Timpf (1994), "Multiple representations for cartographic objects in a multi-scale tree—An intelligent graphical zoom", Computers & Graphics, 18 (6): 823–829, doi:10.1016/0097-8493(94)90008-6
  11. ↑ Andrew U. Frank (2001), "Tiers of ontology and consistency constraints in geographical information systems", International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15 (7): 667–678, Bibcode:2001IJGIS..15..667F, doi:10.1080/13658810110061144, S2CID   6616354
  12. ↑ Peter A. Burrough; Andrew U. Frank (1996), Geographic Objects with Indeterminate Boundaries, Taylor & Francis
  13. ↑ Barney Warf, ed. (2010), "Frank, Andrew (1948-)", Encyclopedia of Geography, SAGE Publications, p. 1170, doi:10.4135/9781412939591, ISBN   9781412956970 ,
  14. ↑ Franz-Benjamin Mocnik. "A Scale-Invariant Spatial Graph Model" (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). Vienna University of Technology.
  15. ↑ Farid Karimipour, A Formal Approach to Implement Dimension Independent Spatial Analyses (Ph.D. thesis), Vienna University of Technology
  16. ↑ Rizwan Bulbul. "AHD: Alternate Hierarchical Decomposition Towards LoD Based Dimension Independent Geometric Modeling" (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). Vienna University of Technology.
  17. ↑ Paul Weiser. "A Pragmatic Communication Model for Way-finding Instructions" (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). Vienna University of Technology. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-02-01.
  18. ↑ Conference on Spatial Information Theory, Springer LNCS
  19. ↑ "Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT)" . Retrieved 27 January 2016.
  20. ↑ "Senat TU Wien".
  21. ↑ "Editorial Board of IJGIS" . Retrieved 17 February 2016.
  22. ↑ "JOSIS homepage". Archived from the original on 2 March 2018. Retrieved 17 February 2016.
  23. ↑ "Editorial board of Spatial Cognition & Computation" . Retrieved 17 February 2016.
  24. ↑ Anfragebeantwortung des Bundeskanzlers an Frau Mag. Prammer (23. April 2012) https://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/VHG/XXIV/AB/AB_10542/imfname_251156.pdf
  25. ↑ "Dr. Andrew U. Frank (A) - MÉK, 2011.11.26".
  26. ↑ "TU Wien News 12. Dez. 2011". 12 December 2011.
  27. ↑ "Geographic Information Science and Systems Speciality Group - Awards".
  28. ↑ Gerhard Navratil, ed. (2009), Research Trends in Geographic Information Science, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, Springer, ISBN   978-3-540-88243-5
  29. ↑ Winter, Stephan; Egenhofer, Max; Kuhn, Werner; Raubal, Martin (2018). "Special section in honor of Andrew U. Frank". International Journal of Geographical Information Science. 32 (12): 2497–2500. Bibcode:2018IJGIS..32.2497W. doi: 10.1080/13658816.2018.1503277 . S2CID   52926855.

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