David Mark (October 7, 1947 - September 24, 2022) was a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo, USA. He made several contributions to research and education in Geographic Information Science (GIScience), most recently in human

spatial cognition Spatial cognition is the acquisition, organization, utilization, and revision of knowledge about spatial environments. It is most about how animals including humans behave within space and the knowledge they built around it, rather than space itsel ...

and language.

Education and Professional career

Mark worked at three universities between 1976 and 1978:

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses, all in Greater Vancouver: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located ...

, the

University of Ottawa The University of Ottawa (french: Université d'Ottawa), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ottaw ...

, and the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

. He was an Assistant Professor of Geography at the

University of Western Ontario The University of Western Ontario (UWO), also known as Western University or Western, is a public research university in London, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land, surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and the Thames Ri ...

from 1978 to 1981. In 1981, he moved to the Department of Geography at the

University at Buffalo The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public research university with campuses in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. The university was founded in 1 ...

as an Assistant Professor. Mark was promoted to Associate Professor in 1983 and to the rank of Professor in 1987. In 2007, he was conferred with the title of SUNY Distinguished Professor.

Awards

Contributions to Geographic Information Science

Mark's specialty was in the field of Geographic Information Science (GIScience). He authored or coauthored more than 230 scholarly papers which have been cited over 10,000 times. He researched cognitive and linguistic foundations of how geographic information is conceptualized and used. In the 1970s and 1980s, he pioneered methods for representing topography for digital computers, including the earliest methods for the

Triangular Irregular Network In computer graphics, a triangulated irregular network (TIN) is a representation of a continuous surface consisting entirely of triangular facets (a triangle mesh), used mainly as Discrete Global Grid in primary elevation modeling. The vertic ...

data model. He is credited for a popular water flow routing GIS algorithm, which specifies how to eliminate spurious pits from

digital elevation model A digital elevation model (DEM) or digital surface model (DSM) is a 3D computer graphics representation of elevation data to represent terrain or overlaying objects, commonly of a planet, moon, or asteroid. A "global DEM" refers to a discre ...

s. In 1990, David Mark organized with Andrew U. Frank the NATO Advanced Study Institute in Las Navas del Marquez (Spain). This meeting was the origin of research in spatial cognition and linguistics for the field of

GIScience Geographic information science or geographical information science (GIScience or GISc) is the scientific discipline that studies geographic information, including how it represents phenomena in the real world, how it represents the way humans under ...

. Mark co-authored several widely cited papers on geographic categorization, geographic reasoning, and the ontology of geographic features. In the early 2000s, Mark and Andrew Turk created the area of study called "Ethnophysiography" to study how language and culture are related to people's naïve conceptualizations of the physical landscape. Until his death, he continued to work on most of these topics, with special focus on establishing a foundational ontology of the landscape.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mark, David Living people University at Buffalo faculty Geographic information scientists Canadian geographers Ontologists 1947 births