Andrew U. Frank


Andrew U. Frank 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 is recognized for his achievements in the fields of spatial information theory, spatial database theory, and ontology in GIS. ->

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. 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.

Education

Data storage and query languages for Geographic Data

The results of Frank's Ph.D. thesis were published in 1981 as "Application of DBMS to land information systems" 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". From this line of research resulted eventually "Towards a Spatial Query Language: User Interface Considerations" 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" in Las Navas del Marqués.
He published two articles "Qualitative spatial reasoning about distances and directions in geographic space" and "Qualitative spatial reasoning: Cardinal directions as an example".

Ontology for GIS

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

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

Advising students was a very important part -> of Andrew Frank's academic career and many of his advisees became later professors at other universities, among others:
Further Ph.D. students of the recent years include:
Frank guided through habilitation:
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 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.
At the Vienna University of Technology he served as head of the institute for Geoinformation till this merged into the new department of Geodesy and Geoinformation. He is currently deputy to the chair of the senate of the Vienna University of Technology.
He serves on the editorial board of several Journals in his field: