Ma is a geoinformatics researcher and conducts studies in the joint field of computer science and Earth and environmental sciences. He has worked on data interoperability for more than 10 years at several levels: discoverability, accessibility, decodability, understandability and usability. Recently he was working on provenance representation of data and provenance capture in a scientific workflow. His research interests include: conceptual modeling, crowd-sourcing geoinformation, data visualization, and spatio-temporal analysis of Big and Little Data.