Simon J D Cox

Senior Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Australia

Simon Cox is trained in geophysics, with a PhD from Columbia following degrees from Cambridge and Imperial College London. His engagement with informatics began in the Australian Geodynamics CRC, where Simon moved its reporting onto the emerging World Wide Web, including deployment of a web-mapping system for Australian geology and geophysics in 1995. The challenge of content management for the AGCRC led to an interest in metadata-based systems, and Simon’s engagement with standards when he joined the Dublin Core Advisory Council. Work on XML for mineral exploration data led to leadership in the GeoSciML project in collaboration with a number of geological surveys. An interest in tying these into broader interoperability systems led to engagement with the Open Geospatial Consortium, where he co-edited the Geography Markup Language (GML) standard, and developed Observations and Measurements (O&M) as a common language for in situ, ex situ and remote sensing. O&M became an ISO standard and now forms the basis for operational systems in diverse fields including air-traffic, climate and weather, water data transfer and environmental monitoring applications. In 2009-10 he spent a year at the EC Joint Research Centre in Italy working on integration of GEOSS and INSPIRE. He has served on the council of the IUGS Commission for Geoscience Information and the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences, and amongst other roles currently serves on the OGC Architecture Board, the ISO/TC 211 Ontology Management Group, the steering committee of the Ocean Data Interoperability Platform (ODIP), the International GeoSample Number (IGSN) Implementing Organization, and the Australian Government Linked Data Working Group. Simon is a Senior Principal Research Scientist in CSIRO Land and Water, based in Melbourne, working on a variety of projects across environmental informatics and spatial data systems.