Achievement

Trainee Heath Robinson (Geography) wrote: "My dissertation topic evolved directly out of the interdisciplinary education I had because of the IGERT grant, and I doubt would have otherwise been conceived. My dissertation topic, the ontology of geopolitical entities, especially the state, represents the kind of interdisciplinary research that the IGERT grant is designed to stimulate. It combines elements from political geography, computer science, and philosophy in order to create what I hope will become an ontological backbone for a geographic information system with greater contextual expressiveness. I have been supported by IGERT to spend the spring 2009 semester working on this research in Münster, Germany at the Institute for Geoinformatics. There I have learned a tremendous amount from the ontological research they had done on other subject matter. I am excited to see where this research will lead and look forward to reporting on that during the next reporting period."