Frank, Andrew (1948-)

Andrew U. Frank has been a professor and the head of the department of geoinformation and Cartography at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria since 1999. He has been a leading theoretician and practitioner in the area of spatial data analysis and geographic information science (GIScience).

Frank received his doctoral degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, in 1982. Prior to joining the Vienna University of Technology, he had been on the faculty of the department of surveying engineering at the University of Maine. He has supervised [Page 1170]nearly 40 PhD students, many of whom are now leaders in GIScience. In 2005, he was awarded the national medal, “Grosses Silbernes Ehrenzeichen,” by the president of Austria for his contribution to science.

Earlier in his academic career, Frank made major contributions to the theory and application of spatial databases through a series of influential works on spatial data modeling, spatial data management, spatial data query, and interface design. Subsequently, his interests expanded into the areas of quantitative reasoning and natural linguistics in search of computational models for representing and processing uncertain and imprecise geographic phenomena. His ideas are expounded in his 1996 article “Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: Cardinal Directions as an Example,” which was selected as one of the 19 “most significant and influential articles ever” published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.

Frank's more recent research efforts have been directed toward category theoretic formalization of conceptual models of geographic spaces, objects, and their relations, as well as the ontological aspects of geographic information. In particular, the geospatial information community has found highly insightful his idea of viewing the geographic world from different tiers of ontology, which helps articulate where and how inconsistency between data and reality occurs and propagates in geographic information systems (GIS). Frank has also been recognized as a major contributor to the birth and growth of this relatively new interdisciplinary field, namely, GIScience. Most notably, he is a cofounder of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, a research consortium in GIScience formed by the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University at Buffalo, and the University of Maine. Also, in cooperation with others, he established the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, a leading conference series on GIScience and related disciplines. In addition, he has served in the committees of a number of international conferences and journals. He is currently editor-in-chief of Geoinformatica and coeditor of International Journal of Applied Earth Observations and Geoinformation and is on the editorial boards of Geographical Systems, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Journal of Spatial Cognition and Computation, and Annals of the Association of American Geographers.