Romanian Chapter Report 2012

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Introduction

The Romanian OSGeo Local Chapter is represented by geo-spatial.org, founded in 2007, by a small group of passionate people. Now, our community brings together approximately 700 people, from which app. 25 are constantly involved in projects, FOSS4G conferences and workshops (1 OSGeo charter member).

Chapter Accomplishments

In 2012, geo-spatial.org has continued the series of workshops held every year in 3 different Romanian cities, has continued one of its flagship project, eHarta, started in 2010 and has increased its involvement in the Open Data movement, through active implication in disscusions regarding the Action Plan of Romania for the Open Gouvernament Partnership, organising and taking part at formal and informal meetings with Open Data focus and more.

Visibility at conferences and workshops

  • FOSS4G-CEE and Geoinformatics, 21 - 23 May, Prague, Czech Republic - a general presentation of geo-spatial.org, the study case of building and developing a successful reference point in the FOSS4G community.

Romanian articles and tutorials published on geo-spatial.org:

Work on open geodata:

Open letter

  • An open letter, signed by 184 members of the community, was sent to the Romanian National Mapping Agency (http://ancpi.ro) asking for free access through the geo-spatial.org platform, as a downloadable file or through OGC webmapping standards, of a a vector format file of the boundaries of the Romanian municipalities. The answer was not satisfactory, therefore we will press ahead with our request, with regard to the Open Government Partnership signed by Romania.

Translations

  • With regard to our Open Data movement active support, we have organised and promoted, together with other organizations with similar interests, the translation of the Open Data Handbook published by Open Knowledge Foundation (http://opendatahandbook.org). Four of the geo-spatial.org members were actively involved in the translation, which can be found at http://opendatahandbook.org/ro.

Projects initiated, developed, maintained

  • eHarta - Campaign no. 2. : Collecting ground control points for georeferencing the Romanian maps in Cassini, Bonne and Lambert projections and the Soviet ones in Gauss-Kruger projection. The activity consisted in involving the community in introducing ground control points that would allow an automatic georeferencing of app. 1100 old Romanian Maps. More details can be found at: http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/eharta-campania-ii eHarta is a collaborative project which aims to digitally preserve cartographic materials of historical value of the Romanian territory and, more, to make them freely and easily available to the community through individual georeferenced downloadable files or through web-mapping services. The community involvement was done through the specially developed web interfaces for documenting the maps and collecting ground control points for georeferencing. The project started in 2010. In 2011, geo-spatial.org enrolled the eHarta project into the Open Data Challenge (http://opendatachallenge.org), Europe’s open data biggest competition and won the Better Data Award prize. The prize was awarded at the Digital Agenda Assembly, being held in Brussels on 16th and 17th June 2011, by the European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes. For further reading http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/eHarta?lang=en
  • Documenting OrbView-3 imagery- collaborative project for documenting the quality of the OrbView3 images that cover Romania. The purpose is to ask USGS to georeference only the images taken in clear-sky days and then make them available through standalone files and web mapping services. The community involvement was done through the specially developed web interface. More details can be found at http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/documentare-orbview3

Events

Meetings and workshops

  • 21 - 23 of June, city of Cluj-Napoca, 50 attendees - International Symposium, “Historical Maps in Environmental Geosciences” - The intention that fundament this event is the coagulation of an academic community interested in studying historical maps. Further details can be found at http://www.geo-spatial.org/hmeg/index.php?s=homepage.
  • 27 - 28 of April, city of Cluj-Napoca, 140 attendees - FOSS4G workshop on manipulation and representation of geospatial information. Dedicated workshops on webmapping (TileCache), image processing (LeoWorks), spatial analysis (GRASS, R, QGis). Further details and registered presentations can be found at http://earth.unibuc.ro/index.php?id=382
  • 12 -13 of October, city of Bucharest, 120 attendees - “Technologies, geospatial open data and open knowledge” conference. Further details and registered presentations can be found at http://earth.unibuc.ro/index.php?id=394
  • 23 -24 of November, city of Timisoara, 120 attendees - FOSS4G workshop on manipulation and representation of geospatial information. Dedicated workshops on webmapping (TileMill), spatial analysis and geodata representation (GRASS, GDAL, QGis,Inkscape,OpenJUMP, SoLIM), image processing (LeoWorks). Further details and registered presentations can be found at http://earth.unibuc.ro/index.php?id=396

Hackathons, Code sprints, Cartography sprints, Mapping parties

  • 13 of October, city of Bucharest, 30 attendees - hackathon to raise awareness regarding the necessity of open geodata.
  • 29 - 30 of September, city of Bucharest, 60 attendees - Open Media Challenge hackathon http://thesponge.eu/ . The Open Media Challenge (OMC) was a Knight-Mozilla Open News funded event, initiated by the Sponge Media Innovation Lab for Eastern Europe and organized by CRJI, geo-spatial.org, Ceata, ROSEdu and ApTI. OMC facilitated the writing of code leading to free software solving real-world media problems pertaining to data aggregation & visualization. This collaborative hack initiative, brought together professionals from different fields of activity (Coders, Designers, Journalists and Activists) and was a first in the Eastern European region. Coders, Designers, Journalists and Activists who value media & data specific issues, submitted some valuable proposals and worked to bring these great ideas to life.

Member activities

Areas for Improvement

  • Present the FOSS benefits to companies involved in the geospatial business in Romania

Outlook for 2013

  • Organise the three traditional seminars on free and open source geospatial solutions, in Cluj-Napoca, Timisoara and Bucharest.
  • Organise FOSS4G-CEE 2013 conference in June, Bucharest.
  • Add more data in our web mapping service. In that regard, we had the first meetings with the Romanian NGO http://monumenteuitate.ro/en for adding geoinformation related to forgotten historical Romanian monuments
  • Regular meetings during the whole year
  • Add to the articles and datasets on geo-spatial.org
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