Tomlinson, Roger (1933–)

Roger Tomlinson played a key role in establishing geographic information systems (GIS) from their earliest years. He is one of the very few who merit the title “father of GIS.“

Born in Cambridge, Britain, Tomlinson was a flying officer in the Royal Air Force before attending Nottingham University. He obtained an honors degree in geography (1957) and then moved to Canada for another BSc in geology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia (1960). He continued with an MSc in geography at McGill (1961), while starting work at Spartan Air Services on various forms of terrain evaluation. This work led him to investigate the use of digital computers to store and analyze geographic information. In the 1960s, he joined the Canadian government as head of the development program for an information system to be known as the Canada geographic information system (CGIS). While others around the world began to use GIS terminology at about the same time, CGIS was conceived at a continent-spanning scale from the start. His paper on CGIS in 1968, presented in Australia, may have been the first use of the term GIS in a reviewed publication. The analytical objectives of CGIS were as challenging as the sheer effort in digitizing four map layers across Canada at a scale of 1:250,000.

He obtained a PhD in 1974, writing a thesis that described CGIS in detail. Tomlinson's vision of GIS attracted international attention during the 12-year period in which he chaired the Commission on Geographical Data Sensing and Processing of the International Geographical Union. Since the early 1970s, Tomlinson has worked as a consultant to government and industry around the world. His important achievements come largely from the critical appraisal of actual needs and his commitment to pushing the technology forward. At the critical juncture when the commercial software sector was emerging (around 1980), he and his associates rejected all tenders for the Saskatchewan Natural Resources project. This action held the developers to high standards that were not met until a few years later. In this role, as much as at CGIS, he directed the future of what became the GIS industry and practice.

Tomlinson has been a tireless campaigner for geographic awareness and geography as a discipline and a profession. He has received many awards for service to geography and GIS and was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2001.