OTTAWA — Roger Tomlinson was trying to map planned development and wildlife in Kenya half a century ago when the client found the job too expensive.
The job was to plan a tree plantation to feed a paper mill. Tomlinson wanted to combine information on soil types, rainfall, roads, elephant migration routes that might disrupt the plantation, monkeys that eat young trees, and other survey data.
But it was going to take too many expensive hours of work, and the client backed out.
It was 1961. The British-born Tomlinson had written a PhD thesis proposing that since computers process data faster than humans, they could do this work. But he wasn’t convincing anyone, until he had a lucky break.
On an airplane he ran into a young public servant from the Canada Land Inventory, Lee Pratt.
Pratt needed to map information on millions of square kilometres of Canada, and was looking for a faster way than employing thousands of map-makers.
He took on Tomlinson, and by 1968 his far-seeing recruit had produced the Canada Geographic Information System, the world’s first fully computerized mapping system.
Tomlinson died this month in Mexico. He was 80 years old. If you use Google Earth, have a cellphone or car with GPS or use business data linked to locations, you’re still using his technology. It’s prosaically known today as GIS, geographic information system.
“Right now, as we speak, there are 300,000 government agencies using GIS in 120 countries,” he said in a 2010 interview with the Citizen. “There are over five million people online using GIS and it’s growing by 20 per cent a year. It’s everywhere.
“Just think of how many kinds of maps are out there — maps on agriculture, conservation, crime, demographics, disease, environment and global health. There are about 200 different maps for the city of Ottawa. Think of all the underground utilities, electrical power lines, all the land values, the zoning characteristics, and all the building codes.”
“Even today, a lot of people don’t know the significance of GIS and how much it permeates everybody’s life every day,” said Mike Sawada, a geographer at the University of Ottawa.
“People who use Google Maps are using what invented right here in Ottawa, Canada, back in 1968.”
“It was something that was built out of necessity here in Canada. We have a large land mass, millions of square kilometres in size,” and the federal government wanted to map potential for mining and farming and forestry.
“It was impossible to do it all manually,” Sawada said.
By using computers, “that revolutionized an industry that’s worth multi-billion dollars today.”
GIS links a huge variety of subjects to map locations, anything from census information to health data to marketing.
The U of O’s Barry Wellar worked with Tomlinson beginning in the 1960s when Wellar was a grad student doing work in the same field.
Tomlinson wasn’t alone in inventing GIS, he noted, but he had ambition and the confidence to push a reluctant federal government into accepting it.
The task brought together surveyors, remote sensing experts and mathematicians, he said, while Tomlinson was like the conductor of an orchestra: “It wasn’t as if he was playing all the individual instruments ...
“He worked very diligently in putting all this together.”
“I don’t think he liked to take No for an answer. And that’s what you have to do with the federal government.”
Wellar said Tomlinson knew how to link his ideas to themes that government wanted to hear — “assessment, development, transportation, all of the things that make the world go around.
“He got stuff done... He really wasn’t a scientist so much as he was operations-oriented. He knew in his mind how he saw the pieces coming together and who the players would be and he had an end game, and he was bound and determined to get there.”
Tomlinson formed his own consulting company, Tomlinson Associates, in 1963. He is also the author of Thinking About GIS: Geographic Information System Planning for Managers.
He became an officer of the Order of Canada in 2013 and has many awards within the geography world: the Geospatial Information & Technology Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and National Geographic Society’s Alexander Graham Bell Medal.
A note from Prashant Shukle, director-general of the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation, calls his death “the passing of a giant.”
He leaves his wife, Lila; three children, Ward, Christopher and Frances; and four grandchildren.
His funeral is set for Wednesday at Hulse, Playfair and McGarry on McLeod Street.