There are very few people involved in GIS who have as rich understanding of GIS technology as Scott Morehouse. In terms of his impact on GIS through the design and development of software, Scott has no peers. For more than 25 years he has been the lead architect of Esri’s software systems, which are widely regarded to be the premier high-end systems in use today.
 
Scott Morehouse is one of the original designers of geographic information systems. He got his start as a young researcher at the beginning of the development of GIS technology. As a geography and software engineering undergrad at Hampshire College in Amherst Massachusetts, he first visited the Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis in 1976 when he was doing research for his senior thesis to develop a landscape simulation model of agricultural landscape change in western Massachusetts. He was invited to join the lab in 1977 and worked there until leaving to join Esri in 1981.
 
While at the Harvard Lab, he became the lead developer for the ODYSSEY product, first developed by Nick Chrisman and Denis White, as it was moved towards commercialization. The project pioneered modular software engineering techniques, command line user interfaces, and new developments in data structures and algorithms, all of which were key skills and knowledge that Scott brought into the early days of software development at Esri.
 
While at Harvard, Scott participated in many of the original GIS conferences including the Endicott House Symposium in 1977 (formally called the First International Advanced Study Symposium on Topological Data Structures for Geographic Information Systems) and the first Harvard Computer Graphics Week in 1978. These forums were crucial information-sharing opportunities for the early developers of GIS and were attended by most of the people who might now be identified as GIS pioneers (Tomlinson, Tobler, Goodchild, Berry, Chrisman, Cooke, Fisher, Poiker and many others).
 
In 1981 when Harvard was not able to follow through on plans for commercialization of ODYSSEY, Scott was invited by Jack Dangermond to join his small consulting company in Redlands. Scott’s arrival at Esri was the catalyst for the development of ARC/INFO. While not a university academic, Scott has frequently been an active participant in many of the important academic research venues such NCGIA Specialist Meetings and early Auto-Carto Conferences. His deep knowledge of what we now consider to be GIScience foundations was critical in aligning GIS with the relational model in the early 1980s, and the object-oriented model in the late 1990s. Under Scott’s strong hand as Director of Software Development, Esri’s software has evolved from minicomputer, workstation and client/server environments, to web-based systems, and now to systems that leverage cloud services and infrastructure. By working to integrate mainstream database concepts into commercial GIS, his contributions to GIScience are as substantial as most of those we recognize in the scientific literature.