Take a break with… Tom Farrington

Tom Farrington is a Consultant at 1Spatial, based in Australia.

He joined 1Spatial at the beginning of 2016 and spends his time delivering client projects and FME training. He holds both FME Certified Professional and Certified Trainer status.

Fun fact about you?

I’m possibly the FME trainer who travels the most to deliver FME courses – last year I covered over 12,000km for just 10 courses!

What’s your favourite transformer and why?

PointCloudFilter – can be used on a surprising number of different data types to efficiently perform calculations and analysis

What’s the most interesting data challenge you’ve tackled?

Mapping the Urban Forest – extracting smooth tree canopy features across the Canberra district from LiDAR data, producing datasets for the management of urban trees together with analysing tree canopy coverage for any subsection of the district – e.g. how much of a suburb is covered by tree canopy. The solution to this project was relatively straight-forward going from point-cloud data to vector polygons. However, the trick to simplifying the process was to transform the data into raster along the way.

How long have you been working with FME? (inc detail about how long you have been training for)

I’ve been working with FME for four years and have been delivering FME training for two years.

What do you love about FME?

The many different data problems that can be solved by FME in so many different ways – there’s always another method or approach to learn!

If you were given an airline ticket to go anywhere in the world where would you go and why?

I’d love to go to South America, particularly Peru, Argentina and Chile to visit the many people I’ve met from these countries who have all invited me to stay “the next time you’re over”. Probably should learn some Spanish first though!

Want to know more about FME?

Get in touch with us on fme@1spatial.com or take a look at our product pages