Krzysztof Janowicz

Biography

Krzysztof Janowicz is a professor for Geographic Information Science and Geoinformatics at the Geography Department and the director of the Center for Spatial Studies, Janowicz is an Editors-in-Chief of the Semantic Web journal. Here at UCSB, he runs the STKO Lab which investigates the role of space and time for knowledge organization. Before, he was an assistant professor (2009-11) at the GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Before moving to the US, he was working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), University of Münster in Germany for the international research training group on Semantic Integration of Geospatial Information and the Münster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL). He holds a Ph.D. in Geoinformatics (2008) and a diploma in Ecology (2003) from the same university.

Research

Broadly speaking, Janowicz's research interests are at the intersection of geographic information science, data science, behavioral geography, and cognitive science. Methodologically, Janowicz's niche lies in the combination of theory-driven (e.g., knowledge engineering) and data-driven (e.g., data mining) techniques to improve the representation, publication, discovery, and reuse of geographic and environmental data. While Janowicz's work can be applied widely across domains that benefit from spatial data and thinking, many of his domain questions center around urban spaces and their citizens. Professor Janowicz is passionate about local differences and how to reflect diversity in common knowledge representation frameworks that too often strive for canonical solutions. The secret sauce to Janowicz's research (success) is his students.