Charles Falkenberg holds a B.S. and an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Maryland and has been developing software systems since 1980. He has developed scientific data delivery systems for oceanographers, ecosystem scientists and space scientists for the last 6 years and is currently is working with the University of New Hampshire (UNH) as part of NASA's Earth Science Information Partnerships (ESIP).  He previously worked in Alaska on a data delivery system for ecosystem researchers evaluating the long term impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

One of the goals of the NASA ESIP program is to search and subset science data by geographic region.  The UNH ESIP has therefore made a gazetteer central to the operation of the tool it is building to support terrestrial ecosystem research (WEBSTER).  This web-based data retrieval tool will support standard gazetteer regions, specialized regions of interest to the user community, and regions that have been submitted by individual researchers as part of a single research effort.