Werner Kuhn (professor)

Werner Kuhn is a professor of Geographic Information Science at the Institute for Geoinformatics of the University of Muenster, Germany, where he teaches on Geographic Information Science, geospatial semantics, reference systems, and cartography. Since 2002 he leads the Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL) working on semantic interoperability, data integration, and ontologies for geospatial information. Werner Kuhn is also one of the founding members of the Vespucci Initiative for Advancing Geographic Information Science, organizing annual summer schools and specialist meetings. Kuhn is a leading expert in the area of geospatial semantics and especially known for his work on Semantic Reference Systems as well as his work on desktop metaphors for Geographic Information Systems.

Biography

Between 1991 and 1996, Prof. Dr. Kuhn was an assistant professor in the Department of Geoinformation at the Technical University Vienna in Austria where he worked in the group of Prof. Andrew Frank. Before, Kuhn was a post-doctoral researcher at the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) at the University of Maine, USA. He got his doctorate in 1989 from ETH Zurich, Switzerland in Surveying Engineering with a thesis on sketch-based geometric modeling, and his Venia Legendi (Habilitation) in Geographic Information Science from the Technical University Vienna in 1995.

Scientific community

Dr. Kuhn was an elected member of the Council of AGILE (Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe, from 1998 to 2002), the international member of the Research Management Committee of the Canadian GEOIDE network (from 2001 to 2003), the Technical Director Europe of the Open GIS Consortium (from 1998 to 2001), and an Austrian delegate to CEN TC 287 on Geographic Information (from 1992 to 1995). Dr. Kuhn is a co-founder of the COSIT conference series. He is a member of several editorial boards of peer reviewed international journals, such as the Semantic Web journal (SWJ), Applied Ontology (AO), Spatial Cognition and Computation (SCC), the International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research (IJSDIR) and the Journal of Spatial Information Science (JOSIS).

Semantic Reference Systems

Kuhn is known for his work on Semantic Reference Systems (SRS) that he proposed as analogy to spatial and temporal reference systems. Spatial reference systems are grounded mathematical ellipsoids that allow to refer to locations on the earth surface. They are remarkable technical inventions: they not only provide a computable form of a location, but also allow geodesists to reidentify individual locations in their environment. That is, they solve the grounding problem and the problem of reference for loci by establishing physical references for "anchoring" an ellipsoid with respect to the earth surface. These reference phenomena are called geodetic datums, and consist in conventional standard directions and positions that geodesists can refer to in their observable environment. A geodetic datum for the positions on a Bessel ellipsoid consists for example of a named spot on the earth's surface like `Rauenberg' near Berlin (Potsdam Datum), and a standard position and orientation for the ellipsoid.

Werner Kuhn suggested to extend this notion to all kinds of information, not only locations. The purpose is to supply reference also to ambiguous technical terms used in datasets. Semantic reference systems are formal theories anchored in conventionally established observation procedures. SRS allow to transform and project thematic data in a similar way as known from spatial reference systems. Accordingly, distance cannot only be measured in geographic space, but also in a semantic space. This distance, either measured between individuals or classes, is also known as semantic similarity. A semantic reference system consists of two parts, the semantic reference frame, i.e., a formal theory such as an ontology, and a semantic datum, which provides for its grounding. The reference frame can be used to describe or define a notion. A semantic datum coordinates interpretations of the primitives of the reference frame among interpreters. It consists of procedural schemes to be established by convention. Sensors, for instance, can be thought of as physical realizations of such semantic datums.

Semantic Reference Systems are similar to the Attribute Reference Systems propsoed by Nicholas Chrisman in his book on 'Exploring Geographical Information Systems'.

The role of metaphors and affordances in geographic information

Werner Kuhn suggested to use metaphorical concepts, such as Mark Johnson's image schemas, as well as action potentials, such as Gibson's affordances, in order to semantically describe spatial categories and geodata. For example, on a most general level, a house can be described in terms a containment schema. The containment schema has a "is in" relation. However, this relation, in turn, can express various concrete affordances, such as the affordance of a house to shelter people (home), or to store boats (boathouse). Similarly, traffic infrastructure can be described with a path schema on a general level, standing for different kinds of concrete locomotion affordances. In this way, metaphors provide a generic interface for geographic information, while affordances provide for its conrete meaning. The major advantage is that this level of semantic description is not bound to any physical commitments (such as requiring roads to be paved), and seems to come close to how people think about geographic categories.

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