Paul Ramsey,OSGeo,Victoria, British Columbia, Ca­n­ada, email:pramsey@cleverelephant.ca
Practical considerations led Paul Ramsey to begin working with open-source geospatial software; in 2001 a client needed a spatial database for a project and the proprietary alternatives at the time were both expensive and bulky. The solution Ramsey and his company developed was PostGIS; it proved useful too in other projects for other clients, and was soon adopted as the standard spatial database for the open-source community. Today PostGIS is used globally by organisations differing in scale from graduate research project and community mapping to DigitalGlobe and NASA. Paul Ramsey is a director of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), committed to several open-source projects and a popular speaker and teacher on open-source topics at geospatial conferences and workshops.