Preface for Vol 8 FOSS4G Prague

This special issue about the FOSS4G-CEE & Geoinformatics 2012, held for the first time in May 2012, is offering selected reviewed papers of the conference. Geoinformatics FCE CTU, started in 2006 at the Department of Mapping and Cartography, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, covered the academic section of FOSS4G-CEE. The acronym FOSS4G was first introduced in 2004 as an acronym for Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics by a Japanese research group in a publication and then used for the GRASS GIS Users Conference held in 2004 in Bangkok, Thailand. Later on this acronym was transferred to Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo.org) for their annual conference. The FOSS4G-CEE 2012 was the first regional FOSS4G conference in Central and East Europe. There were more than sixty presentations, six workshops and five tutorials accepted for the conference. Number of registered participants was 120 from twenty countries, namely the Czech Republik (35), Romania (14), Germany (12), France (6), Austria (5), Slovakia (4) and Estonia, Hungary, Switzerland, Poland, Turkey, USA, Italy, United Kingdom, Croatia, Rwanda, New Zealand, Georgia, Ghana and Nigeria (ranging from 3 to 1 participants).