Keynote: The story of geo-spatial.org, the reference point of the Romanian geospatial community

geo-spatial.org is a web portal that contains articles, tutorials and data from geospatial domains of expertise such as: digital cartography, historical cartography, neogeography, virtual terrain modeling, remote sensing, geographical informational systems and global positioning systems. The site was launched in 2007 as a response to the need of communication of a newly born but growing community. geo-spatial.org promotes large scale usage of open source solutions, without ignoring the proprietary ones. It militates for open access to geographical data and it puts forth the map as a universal instrument for communication and recording the relationships between social components (scientific, political, cultural, religious, economical) and their geospatial dimension. The portal is associated with a forum and a mailing list with over 900 members. The main purpose is to become the reference point for the Romanian speaking geo professionals, through the coagulation of an active community that would professionally progress through sharing the knowledge, contributing in the same time to the breeding of the next generation of geospatial specialists.