GRASS Users Italia

La comunità italiana è stata particolarmente attiva e coinvolta sin dagli albori del software geospaziale open source, infatti possiamo dire che in Italia Università e Geospatial Open Source sono buoni compagni con una lunga storia di partecipazione, cooperazione e amicizia.

   PROCEEDINGS OF THE FOSS4G 2022 ACADEMIC TRACK – A NEW RENAISSANCE
   Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) 2022
   Academic Track, 22–28 August 2022, Florence, Italy

The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences Volume XLVIII-4/W1-2022

-- The Italian community has been particularly active and involved since the dawn of open source geospatial software, in fact we can say that in Italy University and Geospatial Open Source are good companions with a long history of participation, cooperation and friendship.

The first meeting of Italian geographic open source enthusiasts took place in 2000 (January 28, 2000) at Politecnico di Milano, at the Campus located in Como (Northern Italy). At that time, the concept of GIS itself was not very widespread in Italy (the first university teaching of GIS occurred only in 1993) and the Open Source GIS was more than worthily represented by GRASS GIS. The name chosen for this meeting was indeed “First meeting of GRASS users”. The participation was above expectations (about sixty people), a sign that something was happening. The proceedings of the conference were collected in a volume called Geomatics Workbooks Volume 1 and are still available, as a historical find for the most curious. The open source geospatial had peeped out in Italy, we had studied and counted each other and we had understood that it would be a great adventure, which manifests itself today with this conference and with bright hopes to continue in the future. This first meeting was followed by others (about one per year), with growing attention and participation. The proceedings of these events are also available in the following volumes of the Geomatics Workbooks.

After the organization of the “Second meeting of GRASS users” in Trento in 2001, noticing the growing interest and number of participants, it was a natural consequence for the Italian geographic open source enthusiasts to try to test the international interest around these topics. Therefore, the Open Source Free Software GIS - GRASS users international conference 2002 was organized in Trento, as a result of the joint effort of many GRASS GIS developers and users all over the world to foster closer relations and to provide opportunities for greater interactions among the Open GIS and GRASS GIS communities, with a special attention for users from developing countries. The conference, organized by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Trento with the help of an Organizing Committee including some of the most prominent GIS/GRASS experts around the world, gathered around 140 participants. Therefore, although the first event that was officially branded as a FOSS4G international conference was held in 2004 in Bangkok, we can state that the first international event gathering together the key international figures was held in Trento, Italy, on 11-13 September 2002. Many of the important key individuals that came together at that time from all over the world initiated collaborations, research projects, and software development, which set off a chain of events that ultimately brought us all to Florence 20 years later. It must be noticed that many of the international experts that were present in 2002 in Trento are still active members of the community.

After these successes, the Italian FOSS4G community never lost its moment and continued to spread the use and development of software with conferences, educational initiatives, courses and involving scientific communities of different groups. We are extremely grateful to the Italian research and education community, which is made up of universities and research centres, young researchers and PhD students for their commitment and ongoing efforts to promote and enhance FOSS4G and also to the user and community segment, represented by GFOSS.it that the academic sector strongly contributed to create.

Thanks to these efforts, a few years later, even in Italy, geospatial web applications were permeating the world of research. In 2010, hosted by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and specifically the Technical Commission of Geospatial Information, the 1st International Workshop on Pervasive Web Mapping, Geoprocessing and Services was organized, an event in which open source still had an important role. Contributions from this workshop (43 papers) were published and are still available in the ISPRS Archives Volume XXXVIII-4/W13

https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLVIII-4-W1-2022-1-2022 | © Author(s) 2022. CC BY 4.0 License.