[OSGeo-Announce] Prof. Helena Mitasova Receives Sol Katz Award

[Frank Warmerdam]

Prof. Helena Mitasova was honored with the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free 
and Open Source Software 2010 during the closing plenary of the FOSS4G 2010 
conference in Barcelona, Spain. Helena has contributed a variety of methods, 
algorithms, documentation and tutorials amongst other efforts to the FOSS4G 
community. Her outstanding contributions date back to 1990 when she started to 
develop new analytical modules for GRASS GIS. Since then she served on many 
committees within OSGeo, she is coauthor of the first Open Source GIS book; she 
published over 50 scientific and academic publications linked to FOSS4G and 
contributed a rich OSGeo GIS dataset to the community which has become a 
standard for software testing and teaching. See Helena's video acceptance.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tQzwiiHYII


Background
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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.

   http://www.osgeo.org/solkatz