The world, the computer, and the mind: how Andrew Frank helped make human language and cognition cornerstones of geographic information science

ABSTRACT

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, cognitive science was included as one of the key disciplines in the emerging multidisciplinary field of geographic information science (GIScience). One of the key proponents and popularizers of the study of human cognition as part of GIScience – and one of its major researchers – has been Andrew U. Frank. In this essay, we review the history of Andrew Frank’s role as an innovator and champion for cognitive GIScience, and summarize some of his research contributions in this domain. Taken along with his contributions to other areas of GIScience, this review shows that Andrew Frank has been one of the primary figures in modern GIScience, and among its very broadest and intellectually-diverse contributors.

KEYWORDS:

• Andrew Frank
• cognition
• cognitive issues in GIScience
• formalization
• qualitative reasoning

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Gilberto Câmara and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. Of course, we thank Andrew Frank for years of intellectually stimulating interaction and his many contributions to establishing GIScience as an intellectual field.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.