Advanced Techniques for the Representation and Use of Geographic Information

This award provides support for Dr. Donna Peuquet through the National Science Foundation's Faculty Awards for Women Scientists and Engineers Program. The objectives of this program are to recognize some of the nation's most outstanding and promising women scientists and engineers holding academic positions combining research and teaching, to retain them in academia, and to facilitate the further development of their careers. This award will allow Dr. Peuquet to continue her research on the ways that geographic information is represented, both conceptually and physically, as computer-based data observations. This research will build on research already conducted by the investigator that establishes a conceptual framework for the representation of physical space in geographic information systems (GISs). Software also has been developed to permit synthesis of location-based and object-based representations of data in GISs. The investigator's next lines of inquiry will include expansion of the representational framework to include a temporal dimension, thereby enhancing the capabilities of GISs to assist in analysis of the spatial-temporal dimensions of geographic processes. The investigator also will begin to define a formal spatial language that describes spatial-temporal processes while still incorporating the context dependencies and inexact properties that often are characteristic of these processes. Such a formal language should provide a more robust and flexible spatial database query language than is available using standard query language-based approaches.