Wawer Rafal

Few words about me.

At present I am working at the Institute of Soil Science and Plant Cultivation - State Research Institure IUNG-PIB in Poland and at the same time at the Catholic University of Leuven K.U. Leuven in Belgium. In IUNG-PIB I am running several projects, remaining officially on an unpayed leave. Most of the time I stay in Belgium, working till April 2009 within CASCADOSS project as its Technical Director and some other FOSS4G training initiatives performed at SADL (Spatial Applications Division Leuven, K.U. Leuven R&D) User:SADL:
 * training on application of FOSS4G in land evaluation addressed to the participants from developing countries; link
 * training on OGC WMS/WFS protocols. link

Recently I got involved with SDI domain, within projects targeting INSPIRE (Nature SDIplus, INSPIRE SoP) and SEIS (NESIS).

My professional experience includes: GIS/RS in environmental/agricultural/spatial management domains, spatial modelling (erosion, landsliding, watershed processes), fundamental research on soil science and soil erosion. Recent experiences are: software evaluation, FOSS4G, WebGIS and various aspects of SDI. More details to be found at my professional webpage

I am interested in FOSS4G since 2000 as I was looking for free GIS solutions for my PhD research. Later on I have been using FOSS4G in my enterprise GeoStudio Poland (www.geostudio.pl). Within CASCADOSS I was involved in software evaluation process and general project management. Now I am looking forward to explore the possibilities to utilize FOSS4G in INSPIRE and SEIS. I am strongly dedicated to the idea of FOSS4G as, knowing from my own experience in Poland, the lack of free software for GI and also unavailability of free spatial data, hold the development of GI market as well as diminish the range of environmental assessments and potential scientific progress.

FOSS4G related work:

1. Wawer R., 2008. Evaluation and documentation of Open Source GIS&RS software projects. Evaluation Results. CASCADOSS International Symposium. Warsaw, June 2008.

2. Wawer R., 2007. METAGE WebGIS. UMN MapServer in the Visualisaton of Scientific Results. Annals of Geomatics, Tom V, Z. 1: 113-118.

3. Wawer R., 2006. WebGIS in management in crisis situations. An UMN MapServer example. Conference on "Management in Crisis Situations". Warsaw, May 2006.

4. Wawer R., Steenberghen T., Rusztecka M., Podolczak A., Orlitova E. 2008. Evaluation of FOSS4G software projects for environmental applications. Evaluation of gvSIG. 4th gvSIG Conference, Valencia, December 20008.

5. Van Orshoven, J., R. Wawer and Duytschaever K., 2009. Effectiveness of a train-the-trainer initiative dealing with free and open source software for geomatics. CD-ROM-proceedings of the AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science 2009, held in Hannover, Germany, 2-5-june-2009.

6. R. Wawer, B. Podolski, E. Nowocien, 2009. FOSS4G in landscape assessment. An example from Lublin Region, Poland. Poster. CASCADOSS Regional Workshop for Benelux. Leuven 5-6 February 2009.

7. R. Wawer, T. Steenberghen, J. Van Orshoven. Development of a trans-national cascade training programme on Open Source GIS&RS Software for environmental applications. Poster. 4th gvSIG Conference, Valencia, December 20008

FOSS4G excercises:


 * Customizing Quantum GIS. Core set of plugins:
 * North Star
 * Scalebar
 * Georeferencing
 * MapServer Export (MS4W)
 * Add WFS Layer
 * GPS export
 * Setting up WMS/WFS service and client using Quantum GIS and MapServer. MSWindows environment. MS4W.
 * Setting up WMS/WFS service and client using Quantum GIS and MapServer. Linux environment - CASCADOSS LiveDVD.
 * Evaluating OSS GIS/RS and EA software projects. Evaluation of MapServer. CASCADOSS LiveDVD.

My (a bit outdated) webpages:

GeoStudio Poland

Pulawy Erosion Research Center (PERC)

Vademecum on Erosion Control in Polish

PERC various projects

the webpage for one of my hobbies: blacksmithing and knifemaking REGIONAL