Esri’s product at the time was Arc/Info, the predecessor to ArcGIS, and it was so called as “Arc” handled the graphical / geographic aspects of the data, while “Info” stored the alphanumeric data. The other main company pushing that approach was a Canadian outfit called GeoVision, led by Doug Seaborn. This was the approach that IBM took, but it was uncommon in the industry at the time. One thing I might mention from IBM days is that I was one of the main advocates in the industry back then for the notion that you should store all aspects of your geospatial data in a single database management system. I found it a really interesting mix of challenges from a software design and development perspective - lots of interesting database problems, a very graphical focus obviously, which I find appealing, the challenge of designing systems that can be easily configured and customized, and more. GFIS ran on IBM mainframes and used specialized high-end graphics terminals which cost around £25,000 ($40,000). By the end of the first week I was the UK expert as I was the only one who had read the manuals, and I’ve been in that field ever since. It was a product called GFIS, for Geo-Facilities Information System, a GIS focused on utilities and telecommunications applications. On my first day they told me that they were introducing this new product from the US into the UK, and gave me the manuals and told me to learn about it. It was a bit like going to work for Microsoft in the 1990s or Google today, but distinctly less “hipster” and with more blue suits. I took a job at IBM, which was the dominant computer company in the world back then, in 1986. I studied maths (as we say in England) at Oxford, then stayed on to do a Masters in “Computation”. Q: How did you get into GIS and/or mapping?Ī: Totally by accident.

Peter was interviewed for GeoHipster by Mike Dolbow.

He serves on the advisory board of Aero Glass. He served on the board of OSGeo from 2011 to 2013, and chaired the FOSS4G 2011 conference in Denver. He has worked in the geospatial industry for 29 years, and has served as CTO for two leading companies in the industry (and two of the world’s top 200 software companies) - Intergraph and Smallworld (now part of GE Energy).

Peter Batty is a co-founder and CTO of the geospatial division at Ubisense.

Ge Smallworld Gis Software