News & Events
NSF CAREER AWARD GRANTED TO CISE ASSISTANT PROFESSOR TO STUDY SPACE, TIME AND UNCERTAINTY IN DATABASE INTEGRATION
November 9, 2004
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- In the recent presidential election, CBS News, for the first time ever, used Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to generate maps for its 2004 election coverage. The advanced system allowed CBS to show which presidential candidate was leading in each county around the country, according to GIS.com.
Databases are far more powerful than the vast collections of numeric information that one typically finds in personnel, payroll and accounting databases. In addition to these alphanumeric databases, a database can also contain geometry and spatial information such as the layout of roads, rivers, and buildings in both two and three dimensions.
Markus Schneider, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, recently received a career award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The STU Project: Database Integration of Space, Time and Uncertainty as a Foundation for the Next Generation of Geographical Information Systems is designed to meet two goals: to enhance the data management capabilities of the next GIS generation by integrating the three fundamental features of space, time and uncertainty into their architecture and to introduce researchers and students to these new technologies and prepare them for information technology focused GIS employment.
Schneider's CAREER award provides more than $500,000 funding over five years and integrates two main components: research and teaching. The NSF sponsored Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards for new faculty members. The CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century, according to the NSF Web site.
Many databases deal with alphanumeric information, such as financial and accounting databases, but Schneider's research focuses on more complex data. Many restrictions are imposed on databases that deal with this kind of complex data, such as spatial, multimedia, and GIS information.
Schneider's project proposes to incorporate the aspects of space, time and uncertainty into Geographical Information Systems. Currently GIS lack three-dimensional representation and do not take into account temporal aspects.
"The problem is that all spatial objects, also those that are inherently vague, are represented as sharply bounded objects," said Schneider.
For example, with the recent activity of hurricanes across the state of Florida, one would assume GIS technology would be able to track a hurricane - but it cannot. GIS databases are unable to track movement, passage of time, and objects without specifically known coordinates.
"The purpose of this project is to integrate all three aspects: space, time and uncertainty to produce components that can be integrated
and included in GIS applications," said Schneider.
The implications for his research have a number of applications from geography to disaster management to hurricane monitoring to forest fire control. The challenge and the goal, Schneider said, is to be able to plug in and integrate software components for these three aspects into all computer databases. That way these databases will be supplemented with extensibility features of an outward focus, such as video, and audio, and not merely columns of numbers.
In addition, to the focus on research, Schneider's CAREER award includes a teaching component. He explained that there are two categories of students who utilize GIS: students who are learning GIS applications to apply them, and students studying GIS as a component of their computer science education. Some students studying GIS applications in their fields such as geography, geology and soil science are learning how it works and how to use it specifically in their industry, but they do not have any insight into the computer science side of the data management.
"While geographical information systems on the IT side have a responsibility to the computer science component, it is for the most part, underrepresented and neglected," Schneider said. "There is a huge market in the industry for design and construction of these databases."
In order to capitalize on this demand, Schneider plans to provide students with the opportunity to learn the IT fundamentals of GIS databases. He is lecturing this semester as the first part of his project on "Spatial Databases as a Foundation of Geographical Information." His project also outlines a series of courses over five years to cover all the relevant aspects of GIS databases, from computational geometry, to spatial temporal databases, and uncertainty management.
Schneider, a native of Germany, received his doctorate in December 1995 from the FernUniversitat in Hagen, Germany. He joined the CISE
faculty at the University of Florida in January 2002 and resides in Gainesville with his wife and two children.
Writer: Mandelyn Hutcherson, 352-392-4700 ext. 5011, HutchersonM@mail.vetmed.ufl.edu
Source: Markus Schneider, 352-392-2697, mschneid@cise.ufl.edu
