Janowicz to join geography department as assistant professor

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Krzysztof Janowicz will join the Department of Geography as an assistant professor of GIS. Janowicz may be seen around the halls of the Walker Building starting in December.

Before joining the Department of Geography at the Penn State, Janowicz worked as post-doctoral researcher in an international research training group on semantic integration of geospatial information at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Germany. He earned a diploma in Landscape Ecology from the University of Muenster (2003) and holds a Ph.D. in Geoinformatics from the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster (2008).

His dissertation was about semantic similarity measures between geographic feature types represented in expressive description logics (supervised by Werner Kuhn and Martin Raubal). In his diploma thesis he investigated the composition and interoperation of semantic-enabled web services. He started to work as a student assistant at the Institute for Geoinformatics in 1999 and worked as a research associate since 2003.

During his studies, Janowicz worked as a network administrator, software developer and network security consultant within various companies, as an independent contractor, as well as within his own company called JKSolutions.

In 2001, he published a book about Internet security at O'Reilly Press with a revised second edition in 2005 and third in 2007. Janowicz has authored, co-authored, and edited about 40 articles in journals, books, conference and workshop proceedings, as well as technical reports relating to GIScience, computer science, and cognitive science. His research interests are in semantic interoperability, formal ontology, semantic similarity, analogy, context awareness, sensor web, spatial cognition as well as situated and role-based categories. He organized a workshop on "Semantic Similarity Measurement and Geospatial Applications" held in conjunction with COSIT 2007, was one of the organizers of the Workshop on the Potential of Cognitive Semantics for Ontologies at FOIS 2004, and is program co-chair of the Third International Conference on Geospatial Semantics (GeoS 2009).

Janowicz's teaching activities focus on formal modeling as well as software development.