User:Helen Couclelis

Before joining the UCSB Geography department in the 1980s I spent several years working as an architect and then as a professional planner and government policy advisor in Greece. At Cambridge, where I got my PhD, I was attached to the Department of Architecture’s Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies (now the Martin Centre). My PhD advisor was the mathematician and artist Lionel March whose research was largely on the mathematics and logic of design and who later established the Centre for Configurational Studies in the Open University’s department of Design Technology. Here at UCSB I have served as Associate Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) and as member of the executive committee of the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS). My research interests and publications are in the areas of urban and regional modeling and planning, the geography of the information society, spatial cognition, and geographic information science. In recent years I became very interested in geographic information ontologies. A special focus of mine is the integration of design-oriented (synthetic) perspectives into the mostly declarative current geographic ontologies. Ontologies that support synthetic as well as analytic thinking can be useful in helping construct user-appropriate representations of geographic entities out of suitably selected geographic information, as well as in facilitating spatial planning and design.