The Victoria Organizing Committee

Conference Chair

Paul Ramsey, President, Refractions Research

Paul RamseyRefractions Research

Paul Ramsey is the President and founder of Refractions Research, a spatial database and geomatics consultancy. Refractions is heavily involved in the open source geomatics community, making contributions to PostGIS, Mapserver, GeoTools, GeoServer and uDig. Though educated in statistics at the University of Victoria, he found his true calling in geomatics, and has been working with spatial data, open spatial standards and open source tools for the past 10 years. Paul is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Consortium, speaks and gives workshops on open source spatial technology regularly at conferences and trade shows, and is responsible for technology research and development at Refractions.

Meet the Organizing Committee

Olaf Neimann, Professor, University of Victoria, Department of Geography

Olaf NeimannUniversity of Victoria

Olaf Neimann received his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Alberta in Geography, presenting a dissertation on the fusion of ancillary DEM data with LANDSAT imagery to resolve misclassifications of landcover information. From 1987-1988 he worked at the Alberta Research Council in Edmonton and implemented a number of routines to generate DEM derivative products and segment into landscape units. In 1988, he moved to a faculty position in Geography at the University of Victoria, where he works in the area of remote sensing focusing on primarily on forestry related issues.

Olaf is currently responsible for the research and development of an integrated imaging platform, developed in collaboration with Terra Remote Sensing in Sidney, B.C. The platform combines hyperspectral imaging, LiDAR data collection and digital aerial photography. His team is currently developing a data processing system to take the data to fully corrected (atmospherically and geometrically) and integrated products.

Brian Low, Geospatial Scientist, Pacific Forestry Centre Government of Canada

Brian LowGovernment of Canada

Brian Low is a Geospatial Scientist at the Pacific Forestry Center in Victoria British Columbia. He is the technical architect and applications lead for Canada's National Forest Information System and is the lead on the deployment of the Canadian Forest Service's interoperable infrastructure for the sharing of research information within Canada. He also works with geospatial software in support of research projects and distributed computing system infrastructures. As part of his work on NFIS, Brian has championed the use of open source and open standards software to meet the needs of Canada's Provincial, Territorial and Federal governments. Brian's areas of interest include spatial data infrastructure and spatial analysis. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and a M.Sc. in Geography from the University of Victoria.

Jason Birch, Senior Applications Analyst, Information Technology Office, City of Nanaimo

Jason BirchCity of Naniamo

Jason Birch is a charter member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and works as a Senior Applications Analyst at the City of Nanaimo, about 100km north of Victoria. Over the past fourteen years, he has been a user of most proprietary GIS applications, and some Open Source applications such as GDAL and JUMP. Although Jason is a recent convert to Open Source Geospatial, he has participated in the general Open Source community in the past, with contributions to web-based applications such as phpMyAdmin and Phorum. With the creation of OSGeo, he saw an opportunity to advance the use of Open Source in the professional GIS workplace, and has become involved in several OSGeo committees. Recently, Jason helped to establish the MapGuide Open Source Project Steering Committee as one of the founding members.

Evert Kenk, Executive Director,  Chief Resource Information Office, Government of British Columbia

Evert KenkUniversity of British Columbia

Evert Kenk is the Executive Director of the Chief Resource Information Office within the Integrated Land Management Bureau. As the Chief Resource Information Officer for the Province’s natural resource sector, Evert works with government and industry to develop strategic direction with respect to natural resource sector-wide corporate information management (IM) and planning.

Evert, who has a Bachelor in Forestry Management from the University of British Columbia, joined the provincial government in 1974 to undertake a range of natural resource surveys. Over the next 30 years he held various positions in the area of land and resource information and related systems management, playing lead roles in: providing overall strategic provincial direction; establishing related legislation, policy and standards; and delivering and operating land-related computer systems.

Tyler Mitchell, Executive Director, Open Source Geospatial Foundation

Tyler MitchellOpen Source Geospatial Foundation

Tyler Mitchell is the author of "Web Mapping Illustrated - Using Open Source GIS Toolkits" (O'Reilly, 2005) and is the Executive Director for the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. He is actively involved in the open source community and is a leading advocate for open source geospatial solutions. He regularly leads workshops in conference and academic environments which has helped promote and teach leading edge tools.

Tyle has more than 10 years experience in GIS R&D, management and analysis, largely focused on natural resource management in central British Columbia. For half of that time he has been specifically researching and applying open source alternatives.

"I am very interested in seeing next year's conference come to my home Province and the beautiful location in Victoria. The region itself has significant open source ties and promises to draw many attendees."

Dale Lutz, Vice President R&D, Safe Software

Dale LutzSafe Software

Dale Lutz is one of the co-founders of Safe Software and has over 16 years of experience in spatial data interoperability solutions. An Honours Computing Science graduate of the University of Alberta in 1988, he recently completed his Masters of Software Technology degree with focus on usability. In his position as Vice President of Product Development at Safe, his technical focuses include oversight of the FME product, refining and optimizing the user experience in interactive data transformation environments, and integration of spatial data ETL technology into third-party GIS applications. He is instrumental in leading and coordinating the development team, and also presents at and participates in numerous conferences and tradeshows.

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