[Fossgis-talk] 52°North Announces Winners of Student Innovation Prize for Geoinformatics

[Ann Hitchcock]

52°North is pleased to announce the winners of the 52°North Student
Innovation Prize for Geoinformatics 2011! This year’s jury awarded the
following prizes. 

1.	First Prize: Tobias Kohr of the University of Technology Dresden for
his paper “Development of a service-based Geoportal enabling the Mapping of
Whale Watching”

 

2.	Second Prize: Marcell Roth from the Insitute for Geoinformatics at
the University of Muenster for his paper “Geographic Feature Pipes”.

 

Tobias Kohr’s submission “Development of a service-based Geoportal enabling
the Mapping of Whale Watching” proposes the implementation of a system for
entering and retrieving whale observations by animal-rights activists or
volunteers having a general interested in nature. The concept supports
multilingualism while implementing well established open technological
standards to address the particular requirements and interests of these user
groups. The innovative aspect of this system is not so much the development
of new technologies, but rather the use of existing technologies to solve a
socially relevant problem. Various technological building blocks and open
source software components come together to an overall system which enables
the collection, organization, retrieval and dissemination of volunteered
geographic information. In this case, the focus of the information is the
observations of whales, which - like no other animal species – stand for an
endangered species’ fight for survival. Not only can this system provide
valuable data to whale watchers, researchers and animal activists, but it
can also help to broaden public awareness and discussion of endangered
species protection. 

 

By awarding first prize to this concept, 52°North acknowledges that
technological innovation, in the end, is needed to support society to manage
the earth’s resources in a more sustainable way.

 

In his paper “Geographic Feature Pipes”, Marcell Roth proposes Linked Data
as a trendsetting way to solve the problem of linking and aggregating data
coming from different web services. OGC standards are combined with
subject-specific ontologies to analyze complex spatial or spatio-temporal
questions. The Geographic Feature Pipes portray a process for translating
data from OGC Web Services in to the Linked Data Model. This process can
also be used to continually update spatially dynamic Linked Data data sets.
Thus, Geographic Feature Pipes help to build up the Geospatial Semantic Web.
52°North considers this technologically oriented proposal important for
future development of spatial data infrastructures.

 

This innovation prize was designed to encourage students to contribute to
innovation in the field of geoinformatics. It acknowledges and financially
rewards outstanding innovative and trendsetting concepts and announces them
to a greater audience. First Prize is endowed with 1.500 EUR, plus
reimbursement of expenses for presenting a paper at a Geoinformatics
conference in 2011/2012 (travel, accommodation, fees) up to 1.000 EUR.
Second Prize reimburses expenses for presenting a paper at a Geoinformatics
conference in 2011/2012 (travel, accommodation, fees) up to 500 EUR.

 

The innovation prize is sponsored by 52°North GmbH, con terra GmbH, ESRI
Deutschland GmbH, the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth
Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente and the Institute for
Geoinformatics at the University of Muenster. These institutions work
together under the banner of the 52°North Open Source Initiative to promote
research and education in the field of Geoinformatics. A central part of
52°North’s activities is the constant exchange of research ideas and
innovative developments between academia and business. Based in Muenster,
the 52°North Initiative possesses a level of potential which is unique
throughout Europe when it comes to the development of innovative solutions
in the field of geoinformation as a whole, as well as in its constituent
applications.

 

We congratulate the winners!

 

-- 

Ann Hitchcock

52°North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH

Martin-Luther-King-Weg 24

48155 Muenster, Germany

 

tel. +49 (0)251 396371 -21

fax: +49 (0)251 396371 -11

 

a.hitchcock at 52north.org

http://52north.org

 

General Managers:

Dr. Albert Remke, Dr. Andreas Wytzisk

Local Court Muenster HRB 10849

 

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