Delegates of the 2002 Geo-Ontology Workshop


Brandon Bennett
University of Leeds, School of Computing.

Thomas Bittner
University of Leipzig, Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science

Stephano Borgo
LADSEB-CNR Padova, Ontology Group.
Information about the work of this group can be found here.

Anthony Cohn
University of Leeds, School of Computing
I've had a long standing interest in knowledge representation and reasoning from an AI viewpoint, in qualitative spatial and spatio-temporal reasoning in particular. Much of the work of my group at Leeds can be viewed as the construction of a formal ontology of space and space-time. More recently we have been increasingly interested in applications of our theories, for example in biological
systems and in geo-science. We are currently working with the Ordnance Survey on the construction of an ontology for geographic information, and this workshop is part of our collaboration with the Ordnance Survey.
My publications, together with those of other members of the Leeds Qualitative Spatial Reasoning group can be found here.

Matteo Cristani
University of Verona

Carola Eschenbach
Interests in Geo-Ontology: types of objects and ways of applying predicates to them, temporality and change, synchronic (at one time) and diachronic (across time) identity. Selected References.

Andrew Frank
Technical University of Vienna
Dr. Andrew U. Frank is Professor of Geoinformation at the Technical University of Vienna. He leads an active research group focusing on problems of spatial cognition, user interfaces for GIS, and the economic and organizational aspects of collection, management and use of geographic information.

Antony Galton
University of Exeter, Department of Computer Science.

Jenny Harding
Ordnance Survey

Glen Hart
Ordnance Survey

Chris Jones. I am Professor of Geographical Information Systems at Cardiff University. My work is in the area of the use of ontologies for geographical information retrieval. A few months ago I received an EC IST grant under the Semantic Web Technologies action line for a project entitled SPIRIT - "Spatially-aware information retrieval on the internet", for which I am the coordinator. SPIRIT is concerned with developing tools and techniques to create web search engines that recognise geographical terminology for purposes for finding documents and geo-datasets. The work at Cardiff is particularly concerned with the design and exploitation of ontologies to assist in intelligent interpretation of place names and some spatial relationships.

Werner Kuhn
The fundamental question underlying my research is how the meaning of geographic information can be mapped from one context to another. Typical contexts are human activities, professional disciplines, or natural languages. Contexts are ingrained in human minds, data models, user interfaces, business models, laws and regulations.

David Mark
State Univeristy of New York at Buffalo, Geography Department.
David Mark's current research interests lie in the broad area of human spatial cognition and language. He is studying these topics using both human-subjects experiments and formal models of mathematical structure. Much of work is being conducted in collaboration with Max Egenhofer, University of Maine, or Barry Smith, Philosophy, University at Buffalo. Mark is especially interested in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic variations and universals in the above.

Dave Randell
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College, London
My previous research experience has largely been in Artificial Intelligence, and in particular in the development and implementation of logical theories of space.  The mereotopological theories RCC and in particular RCC-8 originated in my PhD research work while a research student of Tony Cohn, then after as a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick and then Leeds.   Another main strand of research covers the development of knowledge-base systems (KBS), for prosthetic dentistry and agroforestry research and extension.

Jonathan Raper
Department of Information Science, City University, London

Anthony Roy
University of Leeds, School of Computing

John Stell
University of Leeds, School of Computing

Thomas Voegele
University of Bremen
Thomas Voegele has recently been working on  information retrieval and reasoning about spatial relevance with place name structures. A position paper on this subject (in pdf format) is available here.
 

Mike Worboys
University of Maine, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis
Mike Worboys is a professor at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, University of Maine. His home page is at www.spatial.maine.edu/~worboys where his general interests and papers can be found. Of particular relevance to this workshop are three areas: work on vagueness, uncertainty and granularity in spatial information; interest in ontologies of process and action (see forthcoming workshop www.spatial.maine.edu/~actor2002); and work on information fusion based on relating the ontologies (intensional analysis) and looking at the information itself (extensional analysis).