Romanian

We are a small and enthusiastic team of young Romanian researchers/academia folks, working with GIS/RS/Cartography/GPS technology. In order to overcome some of the dysfunctions related to geospatial domain in Romania (lack of geodata, metadata, SDI, obsolete rules regarding the rights to own and use geodata, time consuming bureaucratic procedures related to geodata share/exchange between the interested institutions, lack of a coherent educational strategy, specialized courses in faculties, books, journals, discussion forums) we create a geo-resource website called geo-spatial.org (for the moment will forward you to http://www.earth.unibuc.ro).

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. Currently we are using the website to promote the use of free and open source geospatial software. Multiple articles, tutorials and blog entries on geo-spatial.org are dedicated to this subject. Inspired by Paul Ramsey’s paper, "The State of Open Source GIS", we start a series of three articles called "Open source GIS software, a complete alternative to proprietary solutions". First article include a gentle introduction to the open source concepts and continue with an overview of principal geospatial libraries and toolkits (http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/open-source-gis-I). The second article in this series is dealing with desktop applications (http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/open-source-gis-II). The third (soon to be published) will cover the webmapping applications. Some tutorials describe step by step how to achieve specific actions using open source geospatial software like VTP, GRASS, SAGA GIS, QGIS. More of this kind of materials will be published in the following months. The website already uses existing foss geospatial technologies for data management and sharing (Geonetwork, Geoserver, Open Layers etc.).

After some of us attend the FOSS4G 2006&2007 conferences we conclude that a Romanian OSGeo local chapter, developed around geo-spatial.org, is a good and challenging idea.