Andrew U. Frank

Andrew U. Frank (born February 3, 1948) 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. ->

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.

• Ph.D., Geodesy, ETH Zürich, 1982
• Dipl.Ing., Kulturingenieur, ETH Zürich, 1978

• Andrew U. Frank. "Datenstrukturen für Landinformationssysteme - Semantische, topologische und räumliche Beziehungen in Daten der Geo-Wissenschaften" (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). ETH Zurich. 

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" (with Max J. Egenhofer) 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.

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:

• Yves Bédard (Prof. em., Laval University; first advisor Earl F. Epstein)
• Max Egenhofer (Prof. of Geoinformation, University of Maine)
• Alenka Krek Poplin (Prof., Iowa State University)
• Sabine Timpf (Prof. of Geography, University of Augsburg)
• Martin Raubal (Prof. for Geoinformation-Engineering, ETH Zürich, and Prof. of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Thomas Bittner (Prof. of Geography, University at Buffalo)

Further Ph.D. students of the recent years include:

• Farid Karimipour: A Formal Approach to Implement Dimension Independent Spatial Analyses
• Franz-Benjamin Mocnik: A Scale-Invariant Spatial Graph Model
• Paul Weiser: A Pragmatic Communication Model for Way-finding Instructions

Frank guided through habilitation:

• Werner Kuhn (Prof., University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Stephan Winter (Prof. of Geomatics, University of Melbourne)
• Takeshi Shirabe (Lecturer of Geoinformation, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm)

• Farid Karimipour, A Formal Approach to Implement Dimension Independent Spatial Analyses (Ph.D. thesis), Vienna University of Technology 
• Franz-Benjamin Mocnik. "A Scale-Invariant Spatial Graph Model" (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). Vienna University of Technology. 
• Paul Weiser. "A Pragmatic Communication Model for Way-finding Instructions" (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). Vienna University of Technology. 

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 0and 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:

• IJGIS International Journal of Geographic Information Science
• JOSIS Journal of Spatial Information Science
• Spatial Cognition & Computatin

• Conference on Spatial Information Theory, Springer LNCS 
• "Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT)". Retrieved 27 January 2016. 
• "Senat TU Wien". 
• "Editorial Board of IJGIS". Retrieved 17 February 2016. 
• "JOSIS homepage". Retrieved 17 February 2016. 
• "Editorial board of Spatial Cognition & Computation". Retrieved 17 February 2016. 

• Commander's Cross II-nd class awarded by the President of the Republic of Austria, 2005
• Honorary Doctor of Science, University of Debrecen, 2008.
• Waldo Tobler Distinguished Lecture in GIScience 2012
• Festschrift on occasion of his 60th birthday

• "Dr. Andrew U. Frank (A) - MÉK, 2011.11.26". 
• "Geographic Information Science and Systems Speciality Group - Awards". 
• Gerhard Navratil, ed. (2009), Research Trends in Geographic Information Science, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, Springer, ISBN 978-3-540-88243-5