Professor Michael F. Goodchild has made long-standing contributions to theory and practice addressing accuracy and uncertainty issues in georeferenced data. He was an attendee at the very first Accuracy 1994 conference, a keynote speaker at the Accuracy 1996 and 2008 conferences, serving on both conferences’ Scientific Committees, and has been publishing about spatial data accuracy since 1980. Professor Goodchild is an elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society of Canada and of the (British) Royal Society, and an elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
He is a recipient of the Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud —the highest honor given in the field of geography—and is a past chair of the United States National Research Council’s Mapping Science Committee, and of the Advisory Committee on Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation.
Professor Goodchild has served as editor of two journals and on the editorial boards of ten other journals and book series, and has published more than 15 books and 400 articles. Contributing yet again to the spatial accuracy literature, Professor Goodchild’s inaugural Peter Burrough lecture was entitled “The accuracy of volunteered geographic information.”