---
id: people/michael-goodchild
about:
  label: Michael F. Goodchild
  depiction: people/michael-goodchild.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'Geospatial World, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.'
  description: >-
    British-American geographer at UC Santa Barbara, a founder of geographic
    information science, who coined "volunteered geographic information".
  tags:
    - GIS
    - geographic information science
    - Digital Earth
person:
  affiliation: 'University of California, Santa Barbara'
  role: geographer
  homepage: 'https://people.geog.ucsb.edu/~good/'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Michael Frank Goodchild (his page at UCSB Geography)
      url: 'https://people.geog.ucsb.edu/~good/'
    - title: Michael Frank Goodchild (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Frank_Goodchild'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Michael Frank Goodchild, born on 24 February 1944, is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also holds the title of Research Professor.[^1,2] He took a degree in physics at Cambridge in 1965 and a PhD in geography at McMaster in 1969.[^1] After nineteen years at the University of Western Ontario he moved to Santa Barbara in 1988 with the founding of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, which he directed for over twenty years, and in 2008 he founded UCSB's Center for Spatial Studies.[^2] He retired in 2012 as Jack and Laura Dangermond Professor of Geography.[^1]

His research is geographic information science, spatial analysis and uncertainty in geographic data.[^1] He is widely credited with coining "volunteered geographic information", for map data contributed by the public.[^2] He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and received the Prix Vautrin Lud in 2007.[^1]

He co-edited the [Manual of Digital Earth](/media/manual-of-digital-earth/), on the idea of a navigable model of the whole planet, and [Urban Informatics](/media/urban-informatics/), on data and computing in the running of cities.