University of Nottingham

Post-Doc, Geography

About

Dr Kristin Stock is a research fellow in geospatial semantics at the Centre for Geospatial Science, University of Nottingham. She joined the Centre in February 2007. 

Kristin also runs her own consultancy in geospatial information management: Allworlds Geothinking.  She specialises in geospatial semantics and semantic interoperability, but offers a wide range of services

Kristin's research within the field of geospatial semantics pursues a number of different directions:

1. Deep Geospatial Semantics

This research is in its early stages and is motivated by the superficial nature of current representations of semantics.  Such representations include ontologies, and are characterised by a model of semantics based on categorisation and consensus viewpoints.  While these approaches have their benefits, they do not capture the deeper ways in which people think about the world and the environment with which they interact.  This research involves the development of representations of deep geospatial semantics using logics, including modal logics.  This work also makes use of NSM techniques, and incorporates qualitative research methods for extraction of information about human worldviews and attitudes.

2. Geospatial Behavioural Semantics

This work involves the development of methods to represent the meaning of the behaviour of geospatial objects and geospatial functionality.  Such methods may be used to assist in the interpretation and application of geospatial information, including automation of matching of geospatial functionality (e.g. web services) with user objectives, and automatic geospatial analysis. Kristin is particularly interested in the application of these methods in the context of time-critical situations (for example, emergency management) and to address issues of social and humanitarian importance.

Kristin's recent work in this area focuses on the use of linguistic semantic primitives from Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to express the semantics of spatial objects, relations and their behaviour and to convert these NSM representations into formal representations in information systems.  Forthcoming publications includes an examination of the way people describe spatial relations using NSM (with human subject experiments) and the definition of transformations and relationships between different spatial primitives from NSM.

3. Knowledge Infrastructures

The research involves the development and use of knowledge infrastructures to support the use of geographic information by scientists in the scientific process, and involves various collaborations with Edinburgh, Cardiff and Muenster Universities, with particular focus on the evolution of knowledge and the discovery and visualisation/representation of patterns in the relationships between knowledge artefacts.  Current activity on this project includes the Compass Project and involvement with the development of SKI.

4. Semantic Registries for Spatial Data Infrastructures

This research involves the design of registries or catalogues for spatial data infrastructures that include semantic information.  Work already completed represented these semantics using Feature Type Catalogues, and current work is exploring the inclusion of ontologies in registries to assist in intelligent querying, service composition and automated interpretation of web services and data resources.

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