Dr. rer. nat. F. Mocnik (Franz-Benjamin)

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geo-Information Processing at the University of Twente.

My research focusses on investigating what makes geographical information geographical in the most general sense. These investigations will lead to more informed ways of how to conceptualize and represent individual and thus highly idiosyncratic geographies. Understanding how to integrate subjectivity into formal representations and reasoning processes will ultimatively enable the development of ‘platial information systems’, which will allow us to handle individual conceptualizations of places instead of mere geometric simplifications as it is the case with contemporary geographic information systems.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography at Heidelberg University and a visiting researcher at the Bremen Spatial Cognition Center at the University of Bremen. I have finished my PhD studies at the Research Group Geoinformation of the Vienna University of Technology under the supervision of Andrew U Frank. (You are welcome to read my thesis.) Before I moved to Vienna in 2012, I formed part of the Münster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL) in the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi) at the University of Münster, where I was supervised by Werner Kuhn.