[OSGeo-Announce] Paul Ramsey Receives Sol Katz GFOSS Award

[Frank Warmerdam]

During the closing plenary of the FOSS4G 2008 conference, Paul Ramsey was
honored with the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software
(GFOSS) for 2008. Paul has played a leadership role in the PostGIS, GEOS and
uDig projects. He has also played an important advocacy role for Open Source in
the geospatial field with the government and business communities. The PostGIS
project (a spatial extension to PostgreSQL) is the leading open source spatial
database solution and has contributed greatly to the understanding that FOSS4G
is "enterprise ready". Paul also lead the very successful FOSS4G 2007
conference in Victoria, and is now a director of OSGeo. Paul's video acceptance
is available at:

http://download.osgeo.org/osgeo/conf/2008/ramsey-katz.mov


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.