Richard Law
Senior Researcher Geospatial Development Capability Leader Geospatial Research & Modelling
New Zealand
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRichard Law is a senior geospatial researcher and developer with 11 years’ experience building open-source, interoperable spatial systems and interactive web maps from New Zealand. He leads geospatial research and modelling at the Bioeconomy Science Institute, combining academic rigour from an MGIS with hands-on engineering across serverless backends, React/TypeScript frontends, Mapbox GL, and cloud services. Richard contributes to prominent open-source projects such as pygeoapi—adding JSON-LD support, async job management, and tighter OGC compliance—bringing standards-driven API design to production workflows. His work spans applied geoinformatics (land-use, Discrete Global Grid Systems) to practical products for met-ocean and transport analysis, translating complex spatial science into usable services. As a freelancer he integrates into teams or delivers end-to-end applications, favouring elegant, SEO-friendly APIs and reproducible data pipelines. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic problem-solver who blends visual design sensibilities with robust data engineering.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Masters in Geographic Information Science (MGIS), Masters in Geographic Information Science (MGIS) at Victoria University of WellingtonSt. Patrick's College, Silverstream
French, English
Stackoverflow
586reputation
25kreached
14answers
1question
Github Skills (27)
ogc10
python10
apidoc10
geospatial10
api10
json-ld10
openapi9
docker8
rest-api8
database8
user-data8
database-administration8
databases8
data-model8
dockers8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
geopython/pygeoapi
Sep 2019 - Dec 2020
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:31 reviews, 22 commits, 20 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Richard made several contributions related to the pygeoapi project's back-end functionality, primarily focusing on enhancing the API's capabilities and improving its compliance with OGC standards. They implemented JSON-LD representations for various API endpoints, improving SEO. The user also addressed bugs, improved the API's data validation, and implemented a process manager for asynchronous job execution. Additionally, they contributed to the documentation and OpenAPI specifications.
pythondataogc-apiendpointorganizations
alpha-beta-soup/alpha-beta-soup.github.io
May 2015 - Jul 2024
Contributions:2 PRs, 107 pushes, 6 branches in 9 years 3 months
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