Education
University of British Columbia. Simon Fraser University.
University of British Columbia. Simon Fraser University.
David Mark has made several contributions to research and education in Geographic Information Science (GIScience). His current research interests are in human spatial cognition and language. He worked at three universities between 1976 and 1978: Simon Fraser University, University of Ottawa, and University of British Columbia.
He was an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Western Ontario from 1978 to 1981.
In 1981, he moved to the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo as an Assistant Professor. Mark became to Associate Professor in 1983 and to the rank of Professor in 1987.
In 2007, he was conferred with the title of State University of New York Distinguished Professor. David Mark is researches Geographic Information Science (GIScience).
He has authored or coauthored more than 225 papers.
He researches cognitive and linguistic foundations of how geographic information is conceptualized and used, and also has worked on early algorithms for digital terrain modeling, including the Triangular Irregular Network data model. He created a water flow routing algorithm, which specifies how to eliminate spurious pits from digital elevation models. David Mark organized with Andrew U. Frank in 1990 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Advnaced Study Institute in Las Navas del Marquez (Spain) which started research in spatial cognition and linguistics for GIScience.
Mark wrote several papers with Barry Smith on the ontological constraints of geographic categorization.
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.