About Prof. Dr. Ir. Arnold Bregt

Arnold Bregt (1959) has a Doctors (1992) degree from Wageningen University. From 1983 until 1989 he was head of the Department of Applied Information Science and Statistics at the Netherlands Soil Survey Institute in Wageningen. From 1989 until 1998 he was Head of the Department of GIS, Quantitative Methods and Information Science at the Winand Staring Centre in Wageningen. In this period he was leader of a DLO research program. In 1998 he became halftime professor in Geo-information science at the Wageningen University, followed by a fulltime position in 2002. In 2001 he was appointed as guest professor at the Huazhong University in Wuhan, China. Through his work he has been involved in international projects, consulting missions and lecturing in countries, like: China, Indonesia, Kenya, Philippines, Vietnam and Cameroon, Japan. In the period 1993-1994 he was a visiting scientist for about a year at National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan. He wrote around 250 publications on spatial statistics in soil science, spatial data uncertainty, spatial-temporal modelling, spatial data infrastructures and the application of geo-information science in the natural resources domain. Various presentations at national and international meetings and symposia (average 7-8 per year). His current research interests are Spatial data infrastructures, Spatial data Quality and Land use modelling. The last years he was and is strongly involved in a number of projects and activities concerning the development of the Spatial data infrastructures (SDI). He was one of the initiators and project leaders of the Dutch Clearinghouse for geo-information. Within Europe he has been involved in a number of working groups related to SDI developments. In the INSPIRE (The INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe) initiative of the EU-commission he was chairman of the Impact analysis working group. He was also one of the initiators of the Research programme "Space for geo-information", which was granted a subsidy of 20 million euro in 2003.