_2011-06-17

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

• 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”

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

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.

Tobias Kohr’s first prize paper - "Development of a service-based Geoportal enableing 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.

Second prize winner 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.

Mrs. Svenja Schulze, North-Rhine Westphalia's Minister of Innovation, Science und Research and Dr. Albert Remke, 52°North GmbH presented the winners of the 52°North Student Innovation Prize for Geoinformatics 2011 with their awards at the GEOINFORMATIK 2011 - "Geochange".

Mrs. Svenja Schulze, Tobias Kohr, Marcell Roth, Dr. Albert Remke

We congratulate the winners!