Werner Kuhn is a professor of Geographic Information Science at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also the Director of the UCSB Center for Spatial Studies, and one of the founding members of the Vespucci Initiative for Advancing Geographic Information Science, organizing annual summer schools and specialist meetings. Kuhn is described as a leading expert in the area of geospatial semantics and especially known for his work on Semantic Reference Systems, as well as for his work on desktop metaphors for Geographic Information Systems. Recently, he defined the "core concepts of spatial information," which bridge GIScience with other disciplines.