James has over twenty-five years experience in the geographical information industry, serving in both public sector and tertiary education sectors. He was founding member of the Association for Geographic Information Northern Ireland regional group and is currently an executive council member for AGI Scotland. He has extensive experience of geospatial technologies, the UK GI landscape and how these intersect with the tertiary education sector. He has proven service and project management skills wedded with business acumen and in-depth knowledge of the UK higher and further education sector.GI Specialties: Socio-economic applications of GIS; open source GIS; spatial analysis;web services; visual analytics;spatial data publishing standards, programming and spatial databases.