Sol Katz Award

I never met or corresponded with Sol Katz, but I’ve been puttering around the GIS world long enough to have had cause to use the tools he made available for working with geospatial data in the 1990s.

Sol was an early pioneer of free geospatial software and left behind a large body of work in the form of applications, format specifications, and utilities while at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. This early software archive provided both source code and applications freely available to the community. Sol was also a frequent contributor to many geospatial list servers, providing much guidance to the geospatial community at large. Sol unfortunately passed away in 1999 from Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, but his legacy lives on in the open source world, and the open source spirit of which he was a pioneer.

The Sol Katz Award is given annual to an individual who has demonstrated leadership in the open source geo-spatial community. The Call for Nominations is open right now. If you know someone who embodies the Spirit of Sol, place them in consideration!