Donald Hobern – Director of Atlas of Living Australia
Donald Hobern
Mr Donald Hobern is the inaugural Director of the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). He came to the position from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in Copenhagen where he was Deputy Director for Informatics.
Donald is also Chair of the Biodiversity Information Standards (Taxonomic Database Working Group – TDWG), the international organisation responsible for development of standards for exchange of biodiversity data. He has been active in many of the organisation’s working groups and has overseen a 30-month project funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to modernise TDWG’s processes and data architecture.
Donald’s technical experience includes work with object-oriented programming, databases, web servers, user interfaces and distributed architecture. He also has extensive experience programming in a range of languages, including Java, C, C++ and XML.
His background seems tailor-made for the ALA. Donald won the Marjoribanks Scholarship to study Classics at Christ Church, Oxford, England where he focussed on classical and modern philosophy and Indo-European linguistics. He graduated with First Class Honours in 1986.
After university, he joined the IBM (United Kingdom) Laboratories as a software developer. Still with IBM, he later moved to New Zealand, where he was employed as an e-Business Solutions Architect working as lead designer for web-based software applications. He served as architect for the development of a locally-based internet e-commerce marketplace and designed and led the implementation of a web-based health and safety management system. In all, Donald spent 16 years working for IBM.
But Donald’s interests weren’t confined to a computer keyboard. While with IBM, he maintained his interest in natural history, particularly the birds of coastal estuaries. He took part in a number of ornithological surveys, including national atlas projects in the United Kingdom, common bird census work and surveys of individual species for the British Trust for Ornithology. Since 1997, he has also been an active lepidopterist and regularly operates a light trap to study moths.
In 2002, Donald became Programme Officer for Data Access and Database Interoperability with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Secretariat, and subsequently became the GBIF Deputy Director for Informatics. At GBIF, his responsibilities included adoption of data standards for biodiversity data and the establishment of a global architecture for information exchange. He developed the XML-based architecture for the GBIF network and coordinated the implementation of the central data portal operated by the Secretariat.
Donald believes that with the tools now available the ALA will be an interesting and flexible online encyclopaedia of Australian biodiversity. While the ALA is a national initiative that will unlock over A$1 billion worth of biodiversity resources held around Australia, it will also be part of a network of international initiatives using the power of the Internet to make information on global biodiversity accessible.
Donald is excited to be living and working in Australia with its great wealth of distinctive and charismatic wildlife with so much still to understand and document.
