Thomas Hervey

Thomas Hervey is a graduate student at the Geography Department at UCSB, working with Werner Kuhn. Hervey conducts research at the intersection of geographic information retrieval and spatial cognition. He is interested in understanding how people search for spatial data sets, the way they express their queries, The implicit concepts that they use in their queries, and how we can build tools to make searching for special data easier. Hervey is currently conducting his research as a product engineer working on improving spatial content search and discovery for the ArcGIS Hub platform.

He holds degrees in Geography and Information Systems with certificates in GIScience and web development from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In addition to freelance mapping for the Central Baltimore Partnership, he has research and internship experience through NSF REU GIS fieldwork in Oahu, Hawaii, and manipulating Baltimore City centerline data at JMTTG engineering. At the end of his undergraduate career and during the following gap year, Hervey took additional interests in “full-stack” data science with spatial implications.

Hervey’s current research focuses on theoretical spatial/temporal implications for the future of GIScience tools, and the role linked data and the semantic web can play within spatial problems.