Selected Papers from FOSS4G 2013: OSGeo's Global Conference for Open Source Geospatial Software

Over the past decades, geospatial information technology has reached a significant level of maturity and is widely implemented in industry as well as public agencies. Lately, we have witnessed the rise of free and open source software in this area, flanked by open standards and the open data movement. This special issue of Transactions in GIS includes five research articles selected from the submissions to the Academic Track of FOSS4G 2013, the global conference for Open Source Geospatial Software, which took place in Nottingham (UK), 17–21 September 2013. The FOSS4G conferences, billed as “the annual gathering of Open Source Geospatial Developers, Users and Leaders”, are certainly not an exclusively academic endeavor. Since the first edition in 2006, the core audience has been the people who make up the open source communities: the people that develop, create and craft the open source geospatial software. The actual applications are the glue which binds the community together; the aim of the FOSS4G community is to enable and enfranchise anyone to harness the power of geospatial software, regardless of their economic status. Since that first edition, which took place in Lausanne, Switzerland, the conference has been growing steadily, both in the number of delegates and in the breadth of the audience it attracts. Apart from the core audience of developers, the conference organizers nowadays reach out to existing and potential end-users, educators, students and policy makers. Academic institutions and scientists always have been part of this growing audience, whether as developers of the open source software, collaborators in the design of open standards, disseminators of open source by education, or collectors and hosts of freely available geo-data. The FOSS4G 2013 Academic Track was aimed at bringing together researchers, developers, users and practitioners carrying out research and development in the geospatial and the free and open source fields. With the Academic Track motto “Science for Open Source, Open Source for Science”, the organizers tried to attract academic papers describing both the use of open source geospatial software and data, in and for scientific research, as well as academic endeavors to conceptualize, create, assess, and teach open source geospatial software and data. There was an effort to specifically attract contributions from “early stage researchers” (PhD students, PostDocs) to give them an opportunity to aim for a high-ranking publication and present their work to a large audience of focused professionals. The presentations of the papers were not scheduled in separate academic sessions during the conference, but were clustered with other, non-academic papers based on the subject matter. This was done on purpose, so as to not create an isolated, exclusive part of the conference, but instead to generate attention for academic input in the community and to crosspollinate with industry, developers and users.