Speaker 2025

Codrina maria Illie

Codrina Ilie is a technical geographer, an open source GIS/RS power user, actively working as a project officer to guide and support geospatial and Earth Observation data services development at Terrasigna. In her 15 years of activity, Codrina has focused on using open source Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) solutions for data management, processing and visualization. As an advocate for free and open source software for geospatial, since 2010 she has been a volunteer trainer in the Romanian geospatial community, geo-spatial.org. Since 2013, Codrina has been a Charter Member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and today serves the community as an OSGeo Board of Directors elected member, within her third term.

Mapping the critical infrastructure sustaining our understanding of the Earth

2025FR#Keynote

An overwhelming amount of applications, services and products today have a geospatial component. Whether we study bee health, the consequences of an oil spill on ocean wildlife, search for gold or for a school, even take an Uber home, geospatial analysis and visualisation is at work.
Geospatial technologies have become pervasive, following technological progress, evolving from desktop, to server-side, mobile and into the cloud. A critical part of these technologies are open source. Started in the 1980s, open source for geospatial has reached a maturity level, covering all cycles of geospatial data processing and visualization and it did so by following the traditional FOSS paradigm - community/voluntary based development and maintenance with deep, intrinsic dependencies between projects. And that is an ecosystem. In this keynote, the author will give the short story of a long, winding journey to map the complex, dynamic and ever-expanding ecosystem of the free and open source software used in any geospatial related process, activity or field, from storage to processing to visualisation, from operational to scientific endeavours. The community-led initiative has come a long way since 2016 and, starting with 2023, it has received support from the European Space Agency, leading to significant improvements.