Donald Cooke was a member of the Census Bureau team that developed the Dual Independent Map Encoding (DIME) system in 1967. In 1968 he co-founded Urban Data Processing, Inc, now Harte-Hanks Data Technologies. HHDT is a leader in supplying MCIF services and software to banks.

In 1980, Mr. Cooke founded Geographic Data Technology, Inc, which was acquired by Tele Atlas in 2004 and serves as vendor of premium street and boundary databases for Business Geographics and LBS applications. GDT was the major TIGER digitizing contractor in the mid-1980s.

Mr. Cooke served on the Board of Directors of URISA in the 1970s and received the organization’s Horwood Distinguished Service Award in 2004. He was a member of the National Academy of Science’s Mapping Science Committee from 1989 to 1993. He is a graduate of Yale, and studied Civil Engineering Systems at MIT.