Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan was honored today with the 2012 Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software during the inaugural session of the FOSS4G-India 2012 conference in Hyderabad, India. The award was presented by Ravi Kumar and Vundavallu Aruna Kumar, Member of Parliament. Venka received a memento on behalf of the OSGeo-India Chapter. Venka’s dedication to FOSS4G and his community work around the world, promoting open source geospatial, is second to none. He has been involved in OSGeo since the foundation was formed in 2006, and we are lucky to have such a strong global voice in him. The OSGeo foundation wishes to thank Venka for his wonderful dedication.

Background

The Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software is awarded annually by OSGeo to individuals who have demonstrated leadership in the GFOSS community. Recipients of the award will have contributed significantly through their activities to advance open source ideals in the geospatial realm. The hope is that the award will both acknowledge the work of community members, and pay tribute to one of its founders, for years to come.

Sol Katz was an early pioneer of GFOSS and left behind a large body of work in the form of applications, format specifications, and utilities. In the early 80’s, Sol assisted in the development of a public domain GIS package called MOSS (Map Overlay and Statistical System). This software was arguably the first open source GIS software in the world. Sol would later go on to release and maintain PC MOSS. He was also one of the first involved in public data translator utilities. Utilities that he developed for converting DEMs and reading SDTS files were contributed back to the geospatial community, and are still available today. Sol was also a frequent contributor to many geospatial list servers, providing much guidance to the geospatial community at large. Sol Katz’s collection of GIS utilities at the BLM is still available at ftp://ftp.blm.gov/pub/gis/. Sadly, after fighting Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma for almost a decade, Sol died April 23, 1999 in bed. His legacy will always live on in the GFOSS world.

Recipients

2012: Venkatesh Raghavan
2011: Martin Davis
2010: Helena Mitasova
2009: Daniel Morissette
2008: Paul Ramsey
2007: Steve Lime
2006: Markus Neteler
2005: Frank Warmerdam