Staff profile

David joined CSIRO in 2005 to help define and lead components CSIRO's Water Resources Observation Network (WRON) initiative. He now leads the Environmental Informatics Group within the Land and Water Business Unit.

David's primary scientific interest is the design and development of environmental information infrastructures. That is, socio-technical systems for the efficient and effective sharing of environmentally related information. To this, end he designs and leads projects aimed at creating new environmental information products, developing information models and systems for sharing environmental information as well as systems for managing environmental information.

In his time at CSIRO, teams under David's leadership have:.

• produced the first one-second Digital Elevation Model of Australia
• developed the Water Data Transfer Format (WDTF) for exchange of water data for the Bureau of Meteorology
• led the development of the international water information exchange standard: WaterML2.0 which has now been adopted by a number of international organisations.
• developed the model and methods that underpin the Australian Hydrological Geospatial Fabric (Geofabric), a specialised geographical information system that shows the links between important features of Australia’s water system
• developed methods for exploiting provenance information.
• delivered new systems for discovering environmental information across multiple data catalogues
• delivered the data management systems that underpinned the Bioregional Assessments program
• introduced the concepts of social architecture to the environmental information infrastructure community in Australia

David's interests have recently turned to the 'social' side of information infrastructure and developing solutions to address issues with infrastructure implementation.