Simon Cox is a Research Scientist at CSIRO. He has a PhD in experimental rock mechanics from Columbia University (New York). After a post-doc with CSIRO, he spent four years teaching at Monash University where he first began using GIS. Returning to CSIRO he developed a web-based reporting system for the Australian Geodynamics CRC, including the first web-mapping system for Australian geology and geophysics in 1995, and an early content management system using metadata. Work on XML-based standards for mineral exploration data led on to the GeoSciML project in collaboration with a number of geological surveys. Engagement with the standards community started with the Dublin Core Advisory Council, and moved on to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), where he co-edited the Geography Markup Language (GML) v2 and v3. 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. He served on the council of the IUGS Commission for Geoscience Information and the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences, and is currently on the Technical Advisory Board of the Research Data Alliance, as well as various leadership positions in the Open Geospatial Consortium. In 2006 he was awarded the OGC’s Gardels medal, and in 2013 he presented the AGU’s Leptoukh Lecture. Simon is currently based in CSIRO Land and Water in Melbourne, working on a variety of projects across environmental informatics and spatial data systems.