PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
May 2014
401
In Memoriam
R
oger
T
omlinson
“The Father of GIS” and the transition to computerized geographic information.
November 17, 1933–February 7, 2014
A husband, a father, a mentor, a good friend, a co-worker and a colleague. His contributions to our field
were instrumental in its development into what we recognize today, and he will be greatly missed.
It is difficult for many and impossible for some to remember
a time before maps and areal images could be stored, queried
and served up as electronic bits and bytes. Much of this shift
in mapping’s physical presentation and storage came about
through the contribution of a man called by many the “Father
of GIS,” Dr. Roger Tomlinson.
In the early 1960s, while still in his thirties, he was working as
a photo-interpreter for Spartan Air Services in Canada. Spartan
had a contract to identify the best location for a tree plantation
in Kenya. After various attempts to find an economically viable
solution that included several environmental, cultural and
economic variables using various methods of manual overlay
Dr. Tomlinson turned from manual overlay to his computer.
His computerized approach in the end reduced the task from
a project of three years and eight million Canadian dollars to
several weeks and two million Canadian dollars.
Dr. Tomlinson gives his own account of the events that lead
to the inspection of, at first to what was called “computerized
mapping” and later ARDA Data Coordinate System and then
finally Geo-Information System of the Canada Land Survey, in
“GIS and LIS in Canada,” where he also relates the following
story about the involvement of ASPRS:
“In 1960, Spartan Air Services of Ottawa, Canada, was
a large surveying and mapping company whose business
included topographic mapping, geophysical surveys, land
resources surveys, and other projects worldwide. […]
George Brown, chief of Spartan’s land resources division,
permitted me to try digital methods as a potentially
cost-effective alternative. I created two small test maps
in numerical coordinate form—each 5 x 5 inches and
containing five polygons. I found that these could be
digitally overlaid and that I could measure the resulting
areas from the digital record. Efforts to interest Ottawa
computer companies (Computing Devices of Canada,
IBM, Sperry, and Univac) to partner with Spartan for
future development were not successful. However, in
1962, at an ASPRS conference in Washington, DC, John
Sharp, a consultant to IBM, introduced Spartan to the
digital photogrammetric research being done at IBM
in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the United States. That,
along with subsequent contacts with the previously
reluctant staff in the IBM office in Ottawa, was the
beginning of a pivotal relationship that was to grow
significantly over the years. IBM brought early experience
with computers and programming to the table. I brought
an understanding of the needs, as well as the geographical
training needed to formulate the new concepts and to spell
out the requirements for the system.”
After this, another “chance meeting” with Lee Pratt, the
new head of the Canada Land Survey, brought Dr. Tomlinson
together with a project to create 1,500 maps at scales 1:50,000
and 1:250,000 that were to show the capability of land for
agriculture, forestry, wildlife and recreation, as well as the
present political boundaries. Dr. Tomlinson gives Mr. Pratt
credit for urging him to write, “An Introduction to the Geo-
1
“GIS and LIS in Canada,” chapter 15 in Mapping a Northern Land: The
Survey of Canada 1947–1994, Gerald McGrath and Louis Sebert, eds. (Mc-
Gill-Queen’s University Press, 1999)
