Paul Van Genuchten
SDI Specialist at ISRIC - World Soil Information
Wageningen, Gelderland, Netherlands
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPaul Van Genuchten is an SDI specialist and software engineer with 11+ years focused on geospatial interoperability, open data and discoverability, currently building spatial data infrastructure at ISRIC - World Soil Information. He blends backend systems expertise (PostGIS, GeoServer, Virtuoso, pygeoapi, pycsw) with pragmatic UX sensibilities, believing that technically elegant solutions fail without good interfaces. Paul has a strong track record contributing to major open-source geospatial projects—improving APIs, multilingual metadata handling and catalogue functionality that power standards-based discovery. His background spans consulting, conformance testing and large public-sector SDI projects across Europe and Canada, bringing hands-on DevOps (k8s, Docker, gitops) to production deployments. Trained as an MSc soil scientist, he brings domain empathy to geospatial data problems and advocates for greater awareness of ICT energy use and joyful, open-source collaboration.
11 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
msc, Soil science, msc, Soil science at Wageningen Universiteit en Researchcentrum
Stackoverflow
19reputation
3kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (22)
ogc10
python10
metadata10
geospatial10
api10
bootstrap9
data-provider9
json9
jinja29
apidoc9
html-template9
geojson9
database-design9
bootstra9
python-templates7
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
geopython/pygeoapi
May 2022 - Oct 2022
pygeoapi is a Python server implementation of the OGC API suite of standards. The project emerged as part of the next generation OGC API efforts in 2018 and provides the capability for organizations to deploy a RESTful OGC API endpoint using OpenAPI, GeoJSON, and HTML. pygeoapi is open source and released under an MIT license.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:30 reviews, 10 commits, 58 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the pygeoapi project by addressing bugs, enhancing functionality, and improving the user experience. They modified code related to data providers, including the TinyDB and GeoJSON providers, to handle specific edge cases and file existence checks. Furthermore, the user implemented changes to the API's output, specifically to handle multilingual title fields and the integration of Bootstrap for improved styling and responsiveness of the web interface.
pythondataogc-apiendpointorganizations
geopython/pycsw
Aug 2022 - Dec 2022
pycsw is an OGC CSW server implementation written in Python. pycsw fully implements the OpenGIS Catalogue Service Implementation Specification [Catalogue Service for the Web]. Initial development started in 2010 (more formally announced in 2011). The project is certified OGC Compliant, and is an OGC Reference Implementation. pycsw allows for the publishing and discovery of geospatial metadata via numerous APIs (CSW 2/CSW 3, OpenSearch, OAI-PMH, SRU). Existing repositories of geospatial metadata can also be exposed, providing a standards-based metadata and catalogue component of spatial data infrastructures. pycsw is Open Source, released under an MIT license, and runs on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X). Please read the docs at https://pycsw.org/docs for more information.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 reviews, 8 commits, 52 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to enhancing the pycsw project's capabilities in geospatial metadata management. Their work involved implementing features related to handling external identifiers, preview links for records, and detailed contact information. The user also worked on structuring themes within the database, incorporating improved display and handling of contact and theme information in the output.
pythonspatialoai-pmhoaimetadata
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