Alistair Towers (EDINA, University of Edinburgh, UK)

Contact details:

EDINA, 2nd Floor Main Library, George Square,
Edinburgh University, Edinburgh,
Scotland, EH8 9LJ.

Telephone: +44 (0)131 651 1383

E-mail: A.Towers@ed.ac.uk

Internet: http://www.ed.ac.uk/~alt

Career:

I graduated from the Masters in Geographical Information Systems (Edinburgh University) in 1993, and worked for a short time on the Critical Loads project at the Institute for Terrestrial Ecology at Monkswood, England. I then returned to Scotland to begin work as a GIS officer in the Data Library, Edinburgh University. I was project officer for an online census data delivery system called UKBORDERS, which you will hear more about in Florence. After taking a year out to do some travelling in ‘96/’97 I returned to the Data Library to begin work in the Digimap project, which provides online access to Ordnance Survey mapping and data.

Selected Publications:

Burnhill, P, Ferro, D, Towers, A. L (1996), ‘Digimap, Digital Spatial Data Delivery via the WWW’, British Cartographic Society Proceedings, Reading.

Morse, D. J. M & Towers, A. L (1998), ‘Online Access to Digitised Boundary Data’, Digital Resources in the Humanities proceedings, Glasgow.

Morse, D. J. M, Towers, A. L & Mackaness, W (2000), ‘Systems for accessing boundary data’ The Census Data System, Resources, Tools and Developments, The Stationary Office, Norwich, UK.

Current Research

EDINA is a national dataset centre that provides online access to both bibliographic and spatial data.

My interests lie in the provision of geographic data to the UK academic community via the Internet. To that end, I am interested in spatial data handling, data manipulation, online cartography, and Internet Mapping Solutions.

I also teach users new to GIS and boundary data, how to effectively access spatial and attribute data online.


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