Lewis John Mcgibbney

Lewis is a Enterprise Search Technologist at NASA JPL in Pasadena, CA. Prior to JPL, Lewis obtained a B.Sc. (Hons) in Quantity Surveying whilst working in a private project management and cost consultancy firm in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2012 Lewis obtained his Ph.D. in Legislative Informatics from Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland followed by a Post Doctoral stint at Stanford University, CA where he worked in the Engineering Informatics Group focusing on information integration from heterogeneous information sources and ontology and measurement science development for sustainable manufacturing.

A passionate open source software developer, in 2012 Lewis was invited to become a Member of the Apache Software Foundation where he has held numerous positions with the goal of developing high quality open source software for the public good. Lewis' programming interests primarily concern the information retrieval and semantic technologies software stack. This is reflected by his Committership status on several high profile Apache projects such as Apache Nutch, Any23, Tika, and Lucene. Since joining JPL Lewis has been working on demonstrating and educating the JPL workforce (Earth and planetary scientists) on the benefits and capabilities of open source software specifically related to the areas of information retrieval and semantic technologies. Lewis currently chairs ESIP's Semantic Technologies Committee (http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Semantic_Technologies) which is working to promote research and development of semantic technologies in support of Earth science data discovery, dissemination, and analysis. Lewis is a primary contributor to the SWEET ontology suite (https://github.com/ESIPFed/sweet) and is responsible for open sourcing the project and bringing it under ESIP governance.