Preface for Vol 8 FOSS4G Prague

This special issue about the FOSS4G-CEE & Geoinformatics 2012, held for the first time in
May 2012, is offering selected reviewed papers of the conference. Geoinformatics FCE CTU,
started in 2006 at the Department of Mapping and Cartography, Faculty of Civil Engineering,
Czech Technical University in Prague, covered the academic section of FOSS4G-CEE.

The acronym FOSS4G was first introduced in 2004 as an acronym for Free and Open Source
Software for Geoinformatics by a Japanese research group in a publication and then used
for the GRASS GIS Users Conference held in 2004 in Bangkok, Thailand. Later on this
acronym was transferred to Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo.org) for their annual
conference. The FOSS4G-CEE 2012 was the first regional FOSS4G conference in Central and
East Europe.

There were more than sixty presentations, six workshops and five tutorials accepted for the
conference. Number of registered participants was 120 from twenty countries, namely the
Czech Republik (35), Romania (14), Germany (12), France (6), Austria (5), Slovakia (4)
and Estonia, Hungary, Switzerland, Poland, Turkey, USA, Italy, United Kingdom, Croatia,
Rwanda, New Zealand, Georgia, Ghana and Nigeria (ranging from 3 to 1 participants).

Plenary speakers

Arnulf Christl (OSGeo) works as Systems Architect in the spatial do-
main since the late nineties. His core competencies are distributed spatial
data infrastructures, metadata, agile development and Free and Open
Source Software methodology, deployment and business models. He is
president of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) which he
co-founded in 2006. He is member of the Open Geospatial Consortium
(OGC) Architecture Board coordinating international standard develop-
ment. He contributes to the European INSPIRE process through his com-
pany metaspatial providing consultancy for international SDI projects. In
his latest project he worked as Technical Coordinator of the eContent+

funded project ESDIN and contributed to the European Location Framework architecture
(1.5MB PDF). ESDIN is a consortium of 20 European National Mapping and Cadastre Agen-
cies, private industry and academia headed by EuroGeographics.

Geoinformatics FCE CTU 8, 2012 3



Athina Trakas is OGC’s Director for European Services. In her po-
sition she is the contact person for OGC in Europe, responsible for the
OGC’s activities and networking in Europe. This includes connecting
with European stakeholder organisations, the European Commission and
members, supporting regional and national forum activities and planning
and managing of OGC outreach and recruitment. She has a diploma in
Geography and started working in the field of GIS in 1998. Until 2006 she
was responsible for marketing and key account management at CCGIS,
a consultancy company for GIS. In 2006 she joined OGC as Director for
Business Development on a part time basis. From 2007 to 2008 Athina
was also responsible for Business Development, Marketing and Interna-

tional Business at WhereGroup for Free and Open Source GIS and standards. Since 2008
she is charter member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). In 2009 she was
appointed OGC’s Director for European Services.

Helena Mitasova (OSGeo) is Associate Professor at the Department
of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and a member of the Geospa-
tial Science and Technology Faculty at North Carolina State University
(NCSU) in Raleigh, NC, USA. She has been a member of the open source
GRASS GIS development team since 1991 and she co-authored the first
book on GRASS, now in its third edition. She is a member of edito-
rial board for Transactions in GIS and a charter member of Open Source
Geospatial Foundation. Her research at the University of Illinois, US
Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories in Champaign and
currently at NCSU has focused on methods for terrain analysis, geospa-

tial modeling and visualization. Her PhD is from the Slovak Technical University, Bratislava,
Slovakia.

Markus Neteler (OSGeo) is head of the GIS and Remote Sensing unit
at the Research and Innovation Centre of the Edmund Mach Founda-
tion, Trento, Italy. His main research interests are remote sensing for
environmental risk assessment, epidemiological GIS modelling and Free
Software GIS development, the latter since 1993. He is principal GIS an-
alyst in several European and national project related to vector-borne dis-
eases and biodiversity. He is author/co-author of two books on the Open
Source Geographical Information System GRASS and various papers on
GIS applications. He is founding-member of the Open Source Geospatial
Foundation and served in its board of directors from 2006-2011.

Vasile Craciunescu (geo-spatial.org) is a researcher at Romanian Na-
tional Meteorological Administration, working in the Remote Sensing &
GIS Laboratory since 2001. He received his diploma in cartography and
physical geography in 2001. Currently is in charge of the scientific and
operational activities in Meteo Romania related to rapid mapping, air
quality data integration, spatial data infrastructure and web mapping.
Vasile is a FOSS4G and open data promoter and use his free time to
further develop geo-spatial.org, a collaborative effort by and for the Ro-
manian community to facilitate the sharing of geospatial knowledge and

the discovery and publishing of free geographic datasets and maps.



Jiri Polacek (Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadas-
tre) works as head of the Cadastral Central Database (Section of the
Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre) since 2000. In this
position is responsible for the operational run of the Information System
of Cadastre of Real Estates (ISCRE), customer services and data man-
agement linked with ISCRE database. The section is strictly involved
in the implementation of the INSPIRE directive for related data themes
(as „Cadastral parcels“ etc.). Since 1975 till 2000 he worked in several
researcher positions concerned with IT projects, his main research inter-
ests are computer graphics a image processing linked with GIS. His PhD
is from the Czech Technical University, Prague. He keeps a longterm
cooperation with the university as an external teacher and a member of

scientific branch committee. He is a member of presidium of the Czech Association for geoin-
formation (CAGI).

? ? ?

This special issue addresses a series of different topics. In the first paper, Jiří Poláček and
Petr Souček report about the procedure of implementation of the INSPIRE directive and Web
services for cadastral related themes over the past years for the Czech Cadastre. Related
to this, the paper by Anna Kratochvílová and Václav Petráš introduce a new Quantum
GIS plugin for Czech cadastral data which supports the new Czech cadastral exchange data
format. Two papers are focusing on geospatial software analysis: The paper by Peter Löwe
introduces a new module for GRASS GIS which enables the user to perform rule-based analysis
and workflow management. The article by Adéla Volfová and Martin Šmejkal gives a short
introduction to R, the free software environment for statistical computing and graphics with
focus on the geospatial data analysis functionality and methods.

The paper by Ikechukwu Maduako proposes a heterogeneous sensor database framework with
geo-processing spatial analysis functionality integrated in the Sensor Observation Services
(SOS). In their paper, Miloš Tichý at al. present the current system of discovery of dangerous
Near-Earth small bodies which have a chance to collide with the Earth. The article by R.
Nétek illustrates how e-learning systems along with Open Source solutions are used at the
Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic.

Markus Neteler and Aleš Čepek
Editorial Board
October 2012