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Michael F Worboys > Biography

Mike Worboys is Professor of Information Science and Engineering at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, University of Maine. Until 2001, he was Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Geographic Information System Research Group at Keele University, England.

Mike is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, London Mathematical Society, and has held posts at several UK universities, the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory at Oxford and has held visiting professorships at the University of Maine, USA, and the Technical University of Vienna.

Mike began his research career as a mathematician, but soon became interested in databases and information systems.  For the last eight years he has specialized in the data models and foundations for geographic information systems.  His main research areas have been object-oriented models for GIS and temporal GIS.  He is currently interested in multi-resolution spatial data models, and treatment of spatial imprecision.

He is founding Chair of the Steering Committee for the annual national conference GISRUK.  He is the author of the text book "GIS: A Computing Perspective", published by Taylor and Francis, and many papers in the field.  He is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of GIS, Transactions in GIS, Geoinformatica, and the Journal of Computers in Enviromental and Urban Systems.  He is a member of the scientific committees of several international GIS and database conferences. He is Convenor of the UK Research Working Group (WG3) of the National Geospatial Data Framework.

Membership of Professional Societies

  • Member of the London Mathematical Society (elected 1974)
  • Member of the British Computer Society (elected 1985)
  • Member of the Association for Geographic Information (elected 1991)
  • Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (1993)
  • Society Affiliate of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (1994)
  • Membership of National and International Councils and Committees

  • Convenor of the Research Working Group (WG3) of the National Geospatial Data Framework 1997.
  • Member of the Ordnance Survey Science and Technology Advisory Committee 1997.
  • National Steering Committee for the annual national conference series, GIS Research - UK (Chair 1992-95).
  • Council of the Association for Geographic Information (elected 1993).
  • Information and Education Committee of the Association for Geographic Information (Chair from October 1995).
  • Steering Committee for the annual national conference series, British National Conference on Databases (1991-95).
  • Committee of the British Computer Society Special Interest Group on Geographical Information Systems (1992-94)).
  • Steering Committee for the USA National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis Research Initiative 10 on Spatio-temporal Reasoning.
  • Editorial Boards of the Oxford University Press Spatial Information Science Series (1997- ).
  • Editorial Board of the International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, published by Taylor and Francis (1994- ).
  • Editorial Board of the Transactions on GIS, published by Longmans (1996- ).
  • Editorial Board of GeoInformatica, published by Kluwer (1997- ).
  • Editorial Board the Journal of Computers in Enviromental and Urban Systems, published by Pergamon (1998- ).
  • Secretary, RRL.net, The Regional Research Laboratories Network 1995-97.
  • International Programme Committees, including
  • · Conference on Spatial Information Theory
  • · International Symposium on Large Spatial Databases
  • · International Workshop on Constraint Databases
  • · ACM International Workshop on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
  • · International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling