My Mission
To support, maintain and share open-source geospatial tools, standards and teaching materials, and to bring the OGC, academic and OSGeo communities together around open DGGS.Biography
Dr Alexander (Alex) Kmoch is an Associate Professor in Geoinformatics (since 2025) at the Chair of Geoinformatics and Cartography, Department of Geography, University of Tartu, Estonia. He is a Distributed Spatial Systems Researcher with many years of international experience in geospatial data management and web- and cloud-based geoprocessing, focusing on land use, soils, hydrology and water quality. He holds a BSc in Computer Science (Berufsakademie Berlin, 2005), an MSc in Geographical Information Science and Systems (Z_GIS, University of Salzburg, 2012) and a PhD in Geoinformatics (Auckland University of Technology, 2017), where he developed a context-based groundwater data infrastructure. Between 2013 and 2017 he worked in New Zealand at AUT’s Geoinformatics Research Centre and at GNS Science on web services for distributed geoprocessing and hydrogeological data, before joining the University of Tartu as a Research Fellow in 2017.
His open-source background goes back to two Google Summer of Code scholarships (2012: a WaterML2 time-series service on 52°North SOS; 2015: GeoTrellis with Cassandra on Apache Spark). He has long been involved in spatial data infrastructures and the OGC. He is Europe Co-Chair of the OGC DGGS Domain Working Group (since 2024) and of the OGC University Domain Working Group (since 2021), and an Associate Editor of Big Earth Data. He was elected board member of the Estonian Geoinformatics Society (2021-2025). He develops open-source Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS) tools, including dggrid4py, a Python interface to DGGRID, and pydggsapi, an OGC API – DGGS server, and contributed to OWSLib.
At Tartu he teaches Spatial Data on the Web, Spatial Databases and other geoinformatics courses, and contributes to the Erasmus+ joint master’s programme GEM. He shares open teaching materials such as geopython2025 and co-hosted the TartuGeo podcast. He was a member of the Local Organising Committee of FOSS4G Europe 2024 in Tartu and takes part in OSGeo code sprints.
