Franz-Benjamin Mocnik, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, has received the 2020 Waldo-Tobler Young Researcher Award. The prestigeous and internationally recognized award is presented by the Commission for GIScience of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) to acknowledge young researchers for their significant contributions to Geoinformatics or GIScience. Franz-Benjamin Mocnik shares this year's award with Yingjie Hu, an Assistant Professor from the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo. Our sincere congratulations go to both winners.
The selection of Franz-Benjamin Mocnik by the Commission for GIScience is based on the merits of his article ‘A Grounding-Based Ontology of Data Quality Measures’, which has been acknowledged as being of outstanding quality and to enhance the body of GIScience literature. The article asks the question of how data can be assessed for its quality in general and where information about data quality sources from. Data quality is an important factor when using geodata. As an example, spatial and thematic heterogeneity, often found among Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), leads to data quality issues and is, in many cases, the reason why a dataset can be utilized for a certain purpose, or why it cannot. The ontology presented in the article categorizes the various means to assess data quality by the ways they conclude about data quality. That is, by the ways these means determine whether a dataset (or a part of it) is meaningful and describes the environment well. Besides several examples including observation data of organisms and VGI for supporting crisis management, the article applies the ontology to various means for assessing the data quality of OpenStreetMap (OSM), a major collaborative VGI project to create a map.
