Ed Parsons

In 2017 Parsons was appointed as Visiting Professor at University College London in the Department of Civil Environmental and Geomatic Engineering.

In December 2015, Parsons was invited to deliver a keynote address at the GSDI World Conference in Taiwan.

Parsons oversaw the coordination of Google Maps and Historypin in 2012 in an initiative to recover lost photographs and document the Royal appearances of the Queen on an interactive map of the world provided by Google Maps.

Parsons is a registered member of the Royal Geographical Society and he has been employed at Google since 2007. He is a supporter of the relatively new concept of Neogeography. In 2015, he was appointed co-chair of the W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web Working Group, a collaboration between the Open Geospatial Consortium and World Wide Web Consortium along with Kerry Taylor from the Australian National University.

Parsons left Ordnance Survey in December 2006 and he was offered a job by Google. Parsons began working at the London office of Google. He also set up his own company Open Goematics, a strategic consultancy firm focused on the geospatial technology tracking and Neogeography. In 2010, Parsons received an honorary PhD in Science from the Kingston University in recognition of his contributions to the field of GIS and to the university.

When Google Maps was launched in 2005, Parsons was quite excited, as a technology enthusiast and a geography aficionado. In his blog he described the event as ‘’In a few months Google Maps has done more to allow the individual to develop mapping based websites than the traditional GIS industry has done in 10 years. However, in June 2005, he was one of the first observers of the typing error that Belgium had swapped places with Netherlands on Google Maps.

After completing his M.S., Parsons began teaching GIS at the Kingston University. He continued teaching there until 1998. During his tenure, he is credited with having created the first online map of general election results of 1997.

In 1998, he moved to Autodesk as an EMEA Applications Manager for the Geographical Information Systems Division. He joined Ordnance Survey in 2001 as the organization’s first Chief Technology Officer and played an instrumental role in moving the course of the organization from mapping to geographical information and went on to become the youngest director of IT.

Parsons is a British citizen who graduated from the Kingston Polytechnic (now Kingston University) in 1987 with a BSc (hons) in Geography. In 1989, he was a part of the team that established the world’s first undergraduate course in Geographic information system at Kingston University. He completed his master’s degree from the Cranfield Institute of Technology with an M.S. in Applied Remote sensing in 1989.

Ed Parsons (born 26 September 1965) is a London-based Geospatial Technologist and tech evangelist at Google. He is working to evangelise geospatial data for commercial application and consequently, to improve the usability and efficiency of location based tools at Google. He is credited as being one of the core proponents of Google Street View.