My Mission
Open Source and Open Standards to lower the barrier to geospatial data.Biography
Tom Kralidis is a Senior Geospatial Architect with the Meteorological Service of Canada and longtime contributor to FOSS4G. He is chair of the WMO Task Team on Open Source, Expert Team on Metadata, OGC Pub/Sub Standards Working Group, and co-chair of the OGC API – Records Standards Working Group, and serves on the OSGeo Board of Directors.
Tom is the 2024 recipient of the Sol Katz Award for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), awarded annually by OSGeo to individuals who have demonstrated leadership in the FOSS4G community.
For MSC, Tom provides geospatial technical and architectural leadership in support of weather and climate data exchange. He has led the architecture and development of numerous geospatial standards, systems and services for the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) with Natural Resources Canada, as well as using these principles in architecting RésEau, Canada’s first national water information portal in 2005. Tom was the chief architect of the renewal of World Ozone and Ultraviolet Radiation Data Centre (WOUDC) in support of the WMO Global Atmospheric Watch, as well as GeoMet, MSC’s Geospatial Web Services platform of real-time and archive weather, climate and water data.
Tom has been active in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community since 2001, where he was initially lead contributor to the OGC Web Map Context Documents Specification (2002-2007). His current OGC efforts are focused on OGC APIs, MetOcean domain implementation, and Publish-Subscribe (Pub/Sub).
Tom leads numerous efforts in the World Meteorological Organization focused on data discovery, access and exchange. He is a lead architect in the WMO Information System (WIS2), the WMO’s next generation data exchange infrastructure backbone.
Tom is committed to free and open source geospatial software. He is the founder and lead developer of numerous open source geospatial projects implementing international standards including pycsw and pygeoapi. Tom is a developer on the MapServer, GeoNode, QGIS, PyWPS and OWSLib projects, and part of the MapServer, pycsw, and PyWPS Project Steering Committees. Tom is a charter member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and currently serves on the Board of Directors. He is the 2024 recipient of the Sol Katz Award for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), awarded annually by OSGeo to individuals who have demonstrated leadership in the FOSS4G community.
Tom holds a Bachelors degree in Geography from York University, GIS certification from Algonquin College, and Masters degree in Geography and Environmental Studies (research and dissertation in Geospatial Web Services / Infrastructure) from Carleton University. Tom is a Certified Geomatics Specialist (GIS/LIS) with the Canadian Institute of Geomatics.
