Dr. Krzysztof Janowicz officially joined the Geography Department as an Assistant Professor of Geographic Information Science on July 1 and will arrive within the next few days. Before joining UCSB, Krzysztof was an Assistant Professor at the GeoVISTA Center of the Department of Geography at Pennsylvania State University. Before moving to the U.S., he was working as postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi) at the University of Münster in Germany for the international research training group on Semantic Integration of Geospatial Information. Krzysztof did his PhD on similarity-based information retrieval for the Geospatial Semantic Web at the Münster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL). Before starting his academic career, Krzysztof was working as a software developer and Internet security consultant and was also running his own Information Technology company. To ensure that he did not have to spend his entire life in front of a computer (as he put it), Krzysztof also studied Ecology at the University of Münster, Germany. He is the community leader of the 52° North semantics community that develops free and open source software to enrich Open Geospatial Consortium Web services with a formal knowledge representation and reasoning layer, and he is one of the two Editors-in-Chief of the Semantic Web journal, the other being Pascal Hitzler from Wright State University.
Dr. Janowicz’s research interests combine several fields of Geographic Information Science and include the Geospatial Semantic Web, geo-ontologies and Linked Data, Mobile Computing, the Sensor Web, and Geographic Information Retrieval, as well as reasoning about similarity, analogy, and context. In his research, Krzysztof tries to combine different scientific domains, including Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Ecology, and Geography. To summarize his work in a single sentence, Krzysztof is studying the role of space and time in knowledge representation and organization. Although he focuses on Information Science, Krzysztof is quick to point out that he is interested in humans and not in machines. All of the former at UCSB Geography welcome him aboard—and we suspect that many of the latter in our Department will benefit from his expertize as well!
