Codrina maria Illie

Mapping the critical infrastructure sustaining our understanding of the Earth

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.