Romanian Chapter Report 2007

Introduction
The idea of starting an Romanian OSGeo local chapter came out after FOSS4G2006 but it begin to shape after FOSS4G2007. For the moment, the main vehicle for FOSS & OSGeo promotion is geo-spatial.org. The website (Romanian only at this point) represents a collaborative effort by and for the Romanian community to facilitate the sharing of geospatial knowledge and the discovery and publishing of free geographic datasets and maps. Anyone can make a contribution by submitting articles or datasets for publication, adding comments to the existing articles, join the discussion on the mailing list or user’s forum.

Key Accomplishments

 * Visibility at conferences and workshops:
 * 25-27 October 2007: a general presentation of geo-spatial.org, Romanian in formation chapter and OSGeo was done at the 15th GIS Users Conference, in Chisinau (Rep. Moldova).
 * 11 December 2007: a more detailed presentation was done at the second National Spatial Data Infrastructure Conference in Bucharest (http://portal.rosa.ro/index.php?item_id=169, http://earth.unibuc.ro/stiri/conferinta-sdi-2007)
 * 12 December 2007: in the framework of the same conference, we manage to organize a open source geospatial software workshop. Detailed presentations and step by step demonstrations were made for: QGIS, uDig, PostGIS, Geoserver, MapWindow, OpenLayers and VTP.


 * Romanian articles and tutorials published on geo-spatial.org:
 * http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/open-source-gis-I (FOSSGIS applications review: toolkits and libraries)
 * http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/open-source-gis-II (FOSSGIS applications review: desktop software)
 * http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/vtp-primii-pasi (VTP tutorial)
 * http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/wingrass (GRASS Windows installation tutorial)
 * http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/instalare-grass-macosx (GRASS MacOSX installation tutorial)
 * http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/bazin-hidrografic-prin-QGIS-GRASS (GRASS+QGIS watershed delineation)
 * http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/postgresql-postgis-ziggis-arcmap (zigGIS tutorial)
 * http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/vtocx (VTP vtocx tutorial)
 * http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/manipulare-date-spatiale-gdal-raster (GDAL tutorial)


 * Articles:
 * Free and Open Source Geospatial Software. A Complete Alternative to Propriatary Applications (published in a local journal)
 * Developing an Open Romanian Geoportal (presented as poster at FOSS4G2007 and published in a local journal)


 * Work on open geodata
 * Basic Romanian layers (country border, county border, cities) are available for free as plain download and web services (WMS, WFS): http://earth.unibuc.ro/download/romania-seturi-vectoriale
 * LANDSAT true color clipped after the standard Romanian 1:100k map sheets and reprojected in Stereo70: http://earth.unibuc.ro/download/datele-landsat-etm-in-stereo701
 * SRTM clipped after the standard Romanian 1:100k map sheets and reprojected in Stereo70: http://earth.unibuc.ro/download/datele-srtm90-reproiectate-in-stereo70
 * Corine Land Cover clipped after the standard Romanian 1:100k map sheets and reprojected in Stereo70http://earth.unibuc.ro/download/datele-corine-landcover-reproiectate-in-stereo70
 * Old Austrian maps reprojected in Stereo70: http://earth.unibuc.ro/download/harile-austriece-1910-reproiectate-in-stereo70


 * Romanian articles and tutorials to be published on geo-spatial.org in the following month:
 * A translation and adaptation of Gary Sherman's "Shuffling Quantum GIS into the Open Source GIS Stack" tutorial (http://earth.unibuc.ro/preview)
 * FOSSGIS applications review: server-side and webmapping applications
 * Mapnik tutorial
 * Two more GDAL/OGR tutorials
 * OpenLayers basic tutorial

5. Meetings
 * Thursday evening, on 28th, we will have the first meeting (in a local pub here in Bucharest) between authors and  users of geo-spatial.org. The main topics will be related to RO local chapter. Will try to see how we can form a legal entity (like an NGO), search for volunteers for translation of OSGeo website and software, etc. Until now we have 15+ people signed in. Details of the meeteng can be found on the geo-spatial.org mailing list, Romanian only (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/geo-spatial/). On Friday i'll be back with a short summary of the evening.