Share
Chief Executive Officer, The GeoInformation Group
Dr Seppe Cassettari is a geographical information services (GIS) professional, with more than 25 years experience in the development and application of geo spatial technologies. His career, unusually, has spanned the public sector, educational sector and commercial world.
Seppe spent 10 years working for the UK military as a research scientist specialising in mapping, GIS and geographic intelligence, during which time he completed a PhD in GIS at Birkbeck College under Prof. David Rhind. This was followed by 4 years as an academic running the Kingston Centre for GIS at Kingston University where he established the UK’s first undergraduate and technical GIS programmes, courses that continue to this day.
He then moved into the commercial sector to spend 4 years as Managing Director of Longman GeoInformation and President of GIS World Inc, both part of the global GIS publishing activities of Pearson plc, one of the UK’s leading media groups. Following a management buy-out of the fledgling data business within Pearson in 1998 he became the co-owner of The GeoInformation Group, a geo spatial data publishing company, which specialises in productising value-added datasets compiled from various sources, principally aerial photographs. The GeoInformation Group publishes land use databases, residential building classifications by age and type, building height and 3D building models as well as high resolution aerial databases of from 12.5 cm up to 3cm, near infra red, thermal and historic imagery datasets and lidar surveys. The GeoInformation Group was recently voted Small Business of the Year 2008 for the Anglia region, a highly sought after accolade within the Cambridge area. Seppe has a reputation for innovative developments in the application of GIS to broader information systems and in the creation of ‘plug and play’ easy to use geo spatial data products. In 2003 and 2008 GeoInformation was awarded government research and development grants for new product innovations.
He is widely published, having written the much used textbook ‘Introduction to Integrated Geo-information Management’ (Chapman & Hall, 1993), and been technical editor of GIS Europe magazine from 1989 to 1994. He regularly contributes articles to the Cartographic Journal and the GIS trade magazines and is a regular conference speaker.
Seppe Cassettari has been a member of the BCS since 1982 and on Council since 1992. He was President from 2004 – 2006.