John Laxton

Mr John Laxton Information Manager

Location: Edinburgh

Tel: 0131 6500 344

E-mail John Laxton

Biography

  •  2011 –current :  NERC Information Standards Co-ordinator
  •  2010 –current :  Editor of INSPIRE Geology & Mineral Resources Specifications
  •  2003 –current :  Chair of the IUGS CGI Working Group on Interoperability
  •  2000 –2009 :  Deputy Head of Information Systems
  •  1997 –2000 :  Section Leader of GIS in Geospatial Information Systems Group
  •  1996 –1997 :  Field data entry research
  •  1991 –1995 :  Digital Map Production System project
  •  1986 –1991 :  GIS research and development
  •  1984 –1986 :  Database developer
  •  1979 –1984 :  Spatial Modelling Research Project
  •  1978 :  British Geological Survey
  •  1976 –1979 :  Industrial Minerals Assessment Unit
  •  1976 :  MSc, Leeds University, Engineering Geology
  •  1974 :  BSc (Hons), Imperial College, London University, Geology

Current projects and collaboration

  •  CGI Interoperability WG and GeoSciML development
  •  Collaboration with DNF development
  •  Geoscience Standards & Systems Design
  •  Science Futures
  •  2011 –current :  BGS lead for FP7 EarthServer project designed to deliver Earth Science coverage data over the web
  •  2010 –current :  Development of INSPIRE data specifications for Geology and Mineral Resources

Skills

  •  DNF & INSPIRE
  •  GeoSciML (inc XML & GML)
  •  Geoscience data modelling
  •  Project management
  •  UML modelling

Professional association

  •  member of Edinburgh Geological Society

Research interests

  •  3D geoscience
  •  Application of standards to geoscience
  •  Automatic map generalisation
  •  Geoscience data interoperability
  •  Geoscience data modelling
  •  Geoscience semantics
  •  Geoscience workflows

Published outputs

Key papers

LAXTON, J. L. and the CGI Interoperability Working Group Team. 2009. GeoSciML v2: an interchange and mark-up language for geologic information. Geophysical Research Abstracts, 11, EGU2009-5609-1, EGU General Assembly 2009.

REITSMA, F., LAXTON, J.L., BALLARD, S., KUHN, W., and ABDELMOTY, A. 2009. Semantics, ontologies and eScience for the geosciences. Computers & Geosciences, 35, 707-709.

LOUDON, T.V., LAXTON, J.L. 2007. Steps toward Grid-based geological survey: Suggestions for a systems framework of models, ontologies and workflows. Geosphere, v3, 5, 319-336.

COX, S. J. D., BRODARIC, B., LAXTON, J.L. 2005. Standardizing Geologic Data Interchange: the CGI Datamodel Collaboration. Proc 10th International Conference for Mathematical Geology, University of Toronto, Canada.

LAXTON, J.L. and BECKEN, K., 1996. Design and implementation of a spatial database for the production of geological maps. Computers & Geosciences, 22, 723-734.