I am an assistant professor in geographic information science at the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning. My research lies at the interface between conceptual modeling, geographic data analysis and knowledge extraction. I am particularly interested in understanding the concepts underlying spatio-temporal data, inlcuding reference systems, fields, places, spatial objects, events, trajectories and their relationship to human activities, and in practical methods for modeling and handling them with GIS and semantic technology. My second research focus lies in using linked data and Semantic Web technology to support analysts and to enable meaningful statistics. In my view, one of the biggest challenges in making use of big data - besides volume and velocity - is its variety, i.e., the meaningful integration of data and tools of uncontrolled origin.
Before coming to Utrecht University, I was a post-doc at the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation of ETH Zürich, Switzerland, a post-doc at the Institute of Geoinformatics in Münster, Germany, and a visiting scholar and research fellow at the Geography department of the University of California Santa Barbara, USA. I did my PhD in Geoinformatics at the University of Münster in 2011, and before that I worked for 6 years at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Sytems (IAIS) in Sankt Augustin, Germany, in the field of spatial data mining.