FHISO Board

The following individuals are presently serving as members of the Board of Directors of Family History Information Standards Organisation.

Luther Tychonievich – Chair & Technical Co-Coordinator
Luther Tychonievich earned his doctorate in computer science in 2013 and now teaches in the computer science department at the University of Virginia. He became involved with FHISO in early 2013, becoming its secretary in August 2013 and the Technical Coordinator in June 2014. He is fascinated by the technical challenges that family history data present and human-computer interaction that the underlying data models inspire, particularly as it relates to collaborative research.
Seth Taplin – Technical Coordinator & Vice Chair
Seth Taplin is a software engineer, currently at Google supporting developers using the Google Cloud Platform. During his career, he has worked with a number of data interchange platforms, including helping define the standards and first implementation for the U.S. Government’s Commercial Data Provider standard for satellite imagery companies. He is an intermediate level genealogist in his spare time, and has attempted to build some genealogical software of his own but has been frustrated by the difficulty of processing GEDCOM files in a uniform way with modern software libraries.
Roger Moffat – Secretary, Treasurer & Membership Coordinator
Roger Moffat is a transplant from New Zealand, where he last worked as the Manager of the New Zealand Research Station in Antarctica. He has been been involved in FHISO from its start and BetterGEDCOM as well. Roger studied Agricultural Engineering in New Zealand in the 1970s, and became interested in genealogy when he bought his first Macintosh computer in 1988. Serving as Genealogist for the Clan Moffat Society and DataMaster for the Western Michigan Genealogical Society, Roger is well versed in the challenges associated with moving genealogical data between different applications and formats. He’s looking forward to a standards-driven environment where things “just work”.