Sara Lafia

About

I hold a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Santa Barbara and work at the University of Michigan as a Research Fellow in ICPSR. My research is currently supported by a NSF project, Developing Evidence-based Data Sharing and Archiving Policies, where I am analyzing curation activities, automatically detecting data citations, and contributing to the development of metrics for tracking the impact of data reuse.

I have a background in GIS and urban planning, which I apply to expose and integrate multidisciplinary research data. I am committed to promoting technology that enables people to explore and understand public data. My interests also include the Semantic Web and GIS education. I have experience deploying geospatial applications, designing linked data models, and developing data visualizations.

Projects

Self-Organizing Map of Research

Geospatial Voice Assistant

Multi-Level Maps of Research Topics

Core Concepts of Spatial Information

Trajectories of Research

Damage Proxy Mapping for Disasters

Publications

Lafia, S., Kuhn, W., and Caylor, K. (2020). Mapping Research Topics at Multiple Levels of Detail. EarthArXiv. doi:10.31223/osf.io/523ex

Hervey, T., Lafia, S., and Kuhn, W. (2020). Search Facets and Ranking in Geospatial Dataset Search. 11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2021). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2021.I.5

Lafia, S., Last, C., and Kuhn, W. (2019). Enabling the Discovery of Thematically Related Research Objects with Systematic Spatializations. In 14th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2019). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2019.18

Lafia, S., Xiao, J., Kuhn, W., and Hervey, T. (2019). Talk of the Town: Discovering Government Data via Conversational Voice Assistants. In 14th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2019). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2019.10

Seltmann, K., Lafia, S., Paul, D., James, S., Bloom, D., Rios, N., ... and Davis, E. (2018). Georeferencing for Research Use (GRU): An integrated geospatial training paradigm for biocollections researchers and data providers. Research Ideas and Outcomes, 4, e32449. doi:10.3897/rio.4.e32449

Lafia, S. and Kuhn, W. (2018). Spatial Discovery of Linked Research Datasets and Documents at a Spatially Enabled Research Library. Journal of Map and Geography Libraries, 1-19. doi:10.1080/15420353.2018.1478923

Coggins, B. L., Lafia, S., and Torghabeh, B. V. (2018). Dramatic change in North Korea: Instability and human flight propensity. North Korean Review, 14(1), 49-70. ISSN:1551-2789

Lafia, S., Turner, A., and Kuhn, W. (2018). Improving Discovery of Open Civic Data. In 10th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2018). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.GISCIENCE.2018.9

Allen, C., Hervey, T., Lafia, S., Phillips, D. W., Vahedi, B., and Kuhn, W. (2016). Exploring the Notion of Spatial Lenses. In International Conference on Geographic Information Science. Springer, Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-45738-3_17

Lafia, S., Jablonski, J., Kuhn, W., Cooley, S. and Medrano, F. A. (2016). Spatial discovery and the research library. Transactions in GIS, 20: 399–412. doi:10.1111/tgis.12235

Golubovic, N., Krintz, C., Wolski, R., Lafia, S., Hervey, T., and Kuhn, W. (2016). Extracting Spatial Information from Social Media in Support of Agricultural Management Decisions. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval. ACM. doi:10.1145/3003464.3003468

Lafia, S. and Staehli, L. (2016). From Research Objects to Research Networks: Combining Spatial and Semantic Search. In SDW @GIScience: Proceedings of the Workshop on Spatial Data on the Web (pp. 35-40). ISSN:1613-0073