Joshua Lewis graduates with Ph.D. in Spatial Information Science and Engineering
Joshua A. Lewis successfully completed all requirements for his PhD in Spatial Information Science and Engineering and received his doctoral degree in December 2019. Josh is the 62nd student who has received a PhD in Spatial Information Science and Engineering (or its predecessor, the PhD in Surveying Engineering) at the University of Maine. He graduated in 2009 with a double B.A. in Anthropology and in Political Science. Subsequently he pursued a Master’s in Information System, which he completed in 2012 As a doctoral student, Josh was an active publisher in highly competitive outlets. As lead-author he was successful with two fully refereed papers at the 2014 and 2016 GIScience conferences and one at COSIT 2013. He also co-authored another COSIT paper in 2015. Josh worked as Graduate Research Assistant and as Teaching Assistant, including being fully responsible for teaching COS 213 (Advanced Excel Spreadsheet Design) to 80 undergraduate students in the Maine Business School.
Josh’s dissertation entitled “A Qualitative Representation of Spatial Scenes in R𝟐 with Regions and Lines” deals with assessing what spatial information is needed so that all topological relations among an arbitrary configuration of regions and lines are fully preserved. If one considers only the coarse binary topological relations as yielded by the 9-intersection, the two configurations depicted could not be distinguished.
The dissertation developed the Scene Notation, which provides a means for regions and lines to be reasoned about, both regarding the sequences of intersections they have with other objects, the dimension of those intersections, and their containment relations with other objects—including subparts of themselves, such as holes and disconnected elements. These properties were shown to be necessary in order to describe an equivalent spatial scene through the provided intersection-based representation.
Joshua A. Lewis, A Qualitative Representation of Spatial Scenes in R𝟐 With Regions and Lines, PhD in Spatial Information Science and Engineering, University of Maine, December 2019.
Advisory Committee: Max J. Egenhofer (advisor), Kate Beard, Robert D. Franzosa, Torsten Hahmann, and John R. Herring (Oracle).