Venkatesh Raghavan is Professor of Geoinformatics at the Graduate School for Creative Cities, Osaka City University, Japan. He coined the FOSS4G acronym in 2004 to denote Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics and has been promoting FOSS4G ever since. He is also one of the founders of OSGeo and currently serves as the Foundation President and also plays active role in OSGeo Local Chapters in Asia.

His research interest includes Geospatial Processing Services, Sensor Web and Remote Sensing for change detection. Venkatesh co-founded ZOO-Project, the Open WPS Platform. A Team leader and member in several Geoinformatics projects and vast experience in conducting national and international training programs and development of learning materials for RS/GIS using FOSS4G.

On 2012-10-25, Venka was named as the recipient of the 2012 Sol Katz Award, at the inaugural FOSS4G-India event, in Hyderabad.