Simon Cox (3FXW)
Research Scientist CSIRO Land and Water Highett, Victoria, Australia email: simon.cox [at] csiro.au (3FXX)
Simon Cox is a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). He trained as geophysicist, with a PhD in experimental rock mechanics from Columbia (Lamont-Doherty) following degrees in geological sciences at Cambridge and Imperial College London. (3ZBP)
He came to Australia for a post-doc with CSIRO, and then spent four years teaching at Monash University in Melbourne where he first began using GIS. Returning to CSIRO in Perth in 1994 to work on information management for the Australian Geodynamics CRC, he moved its focus for reporting onto the emerging World Wide Web, deploying a web-mapping system for Australian geology and geophysics in 1995. The challenge of maintaining the AGCRC website led to metadata-based systems, and Simons engagement with the standards community when he joined the Dublin Core Advisory Council. Work on XML-based standards for mineral exploration data led on to foundation of 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) v2 and v3. In OGC he developed Observations and Measurements as a common language for in situ, ex situ and remote sensing, going on to become an ISO standard, and forming the basis for operational systems in diverse fields including air-traffic, water data transfer and environmental monitoring applications. (3ZBQ)
In 2009-10 he spent a year as a senior fellow at the EC Joint Research Centre in Italy working on integration of GEOSS and INSPIRE. (3ZBR)
He was awarded OGCs highest honor, the Gardels medal, in 2006, and delivered the 2013 Leptoukh Lecture, which is the highest honor of the Earth and Space Science Informatics focus group of the American Geophysical Union. (3ZBS)
Simon is a member of the OGC Architecture Board and OGC Planning Committee, the ISO/TC 211 Harmonized Model Maintenance Group, the Ocean Data Interoperability Platform Steering Committee, the Australian Government Linked Data Working Group, the Research Data Alliance Technical Advisory Board, and is on Work Package 5 of the eInfrastructure hub in the Belmont Forum. He previously served on the council of the IUGS Commission for Geoscience Information and International Association for Mathematical Geosciences, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Advisory Council. He is currently based in CSIRO Land and Water in Melbourne, working on a variety of projects across environmental informatics and spatial data systems. (3ZB9)