My Mission
Open Source and Open Standards to lower the barrier to geospatial data.Biography
Tom is a Senior Geospatial Architect for the Meteorological Service of Canada, where he provides geospatial technical and architectural leadership in support of weather and climate data delivery. Tom’s professional background includes key involvement in the development and integration of geospatial standards, systems and services for the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) with Natural Resources Canada, as well as using these principles in architecting RésEau, Canada’s first national water information portal in 2005. Tom is chief architect of the renewed World Ozone and Ultraviolet Radiation Data Centre (WOUDC) in support of the WMO Global Atmospheric Watch, as well as GeoMet, MSC’s Geospatial Web Services platform of real-time and archive weather, climate and water data.
Tom is active in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community, was lead contributor to the OGC Web Map Context Documents Specification (2002-2007), member of the CGDI Architecture Advisory Board, as well as part of the Canadian Advisory Committee to ISO Technical Committee 211 Geographic Information / Geomatics. His current standards efforts are in discovery/cataloguing/metadata, the OGC API efforts as well as quality of service. He is also active in the World Meteorological Organization serving as a focal point and expert in a number of expert teams and scientific advisory groups (WIS Metadata, World Data Centres, WIGOS Metadata, Global Cryosphere Watch Information and Services).
Tom is committed to free and open source geospatial software. He is the founder and lead developer of numerous open source geospatial projects implementing international standards including pycsw and pygeoapi. Tom is a developer on the MapServer, GeoNode, QGIS, PyWPS and OWSLib projects, and part of the MapServer, pycsw, and PyWPS Project Steering Committees. Tom is a charter member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and currently serves on the Board of Directors.
Tom holds a Bachelors degree in Geography from York University, GIS certification from Algonquin College, and Masters degree in Geography and Environmental Studies (research and dissertation in Geospatial Web Services / Infrastructure) from Carleton University. Tom is a Certified Geomatics Specialist (GIS/LIS) with the Canadian Institute of Geomatics.