[OSGeo-Discuss] NEWS: Venkatesh Raghavan Receives 2012 Sol Katz Award

Mateusz Loskot mateusz at loskot.net
Thu Oct 25 14:11:30 PDT 2012


Venka, congratulations!

On 25 October 2012 18:00, Jeff McKenna <jmckenna at gatewaygeomatics.com> wrote:
> --
>
> 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 (http://lsi.iiit.ac.in/foss4gindia/)
> 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.
>
> --
>
>
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-- 
Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net



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