Peuquet, Donna

Donna Jean Peuquet, professor of geography at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), is a renowned and distinguished scholar in the area of geographic representation, particularly in representing the dynamics of geographic phenomena.

She earned BA and MA degrees in geography from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo in 1968 and the University of Cincinnati in 1971, respectively. In 1977, she obtained her PhD in geography from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Prior to becoming a professor at Penn State, she held positions at the University of California at Santa Barbara; with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS); in the department of geography, SUNY at Buffalo; and in the International Geographical Union.

Peuquet was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2000 to further her work in the representation of geographic knowledge. The title of this fellowship project was “A Cognitive Approach to Representing Geographic Knowledge.” This project primarily applied geovisualization to develop a cognitively informed application for knowledge discovery of large geographic databases. She also co-organized, with Barry Smith from the philosophy department of SUNY–Buffalo, an interdisciplinary workshop on “The Ontology of Fields,” which was sponsored by the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, in Bar Harbor, Maine, in June 1998. She is also a faculty member of the GeoVista Center, a research center at Penn State that aims to develop human-centered prototypes for scientists and decision makers. She has served as a member of the board of directors of and as lead representative to the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science and the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing's Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

Peuquet has been involved in a number of research projects from the National Science Foundation and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, among other funding agencies. These research projects can be thought of as an effort to advance the synergy between geographic databases and geovisualization for solving problems in areas such as crisis management and national security.

Peuquet has supervised approximately 26 PhD and master's students. She has also published a number of articles on topics ranging from raster versus vector, geographic knowledge representation, and geographic databases to geovisualization. Her current research focuses on capturing the dynamics of geographic knowledge using multiagent systems. Recent research on geographic knowledge representation is often limited to representing a static view of the world, for example, by using ontology, a “semantic graph” that consists of concepts and relationships connecting the concepts. Such a representation can only capture “what is there” for the moment when the representation is generated. But real-world geographic knowledge is dynamic; a representation should be supported with a dynamic mechanism, such as a multiagent system, that can revise the existing representation as geographic phenomena change over time.