David Medyckyj-Scott

David Medyckyj-Scott worked on geospatial information services in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. His early research covered metadata, human interaction with GIS and the organisational use of spatial information. A contemporary career record places him at the Midlands Regional Research Laboratory from 1989 to 1995, followed by a senior-scientist role at Landcare Research. There he co-developed GUILD-on-the-Web with Robert Gibb, bringing environmental spatial information to public web users in January 1996.

In 1997 he joined the University of Edinburgh’s Data Library and led the Digimap project. The EDINA service launched in January 2000 with online Ordnance Survey maps and downloadable data for higher education. He identifies the earlier GUILD work as its conceptual background and recalls about 100,000 registered users by his departure in 2010. The scale and departure date are from his contributor account.

Back at Landcare Research, Medyckyj-Scott was Informatics Team Manager when S-map Online launched in August 2011. He co-authored accounts of the LRIS Portal and S-map Online, and later described the institute’s web-mapping work with Andrew Cowie at GeoCart 2016. His work helped make scientific data available through applications that people could query without desktop GIS software. His contribution to this history also identifies Gibb’s grid-systems work and Richard Murcott’s standards work.