ENGINEERING

Sparx Systems sponsored and presented the CEN/TC 287 Award for Academic Excellence and Innovation in INSPIRE at the recent INSPIRE Annual Conference in Florence.

The award now in its third year, aims to promote academic excellence within the European geospatial community. This year the award was won by Aurete Pereira and Gabriel Luis of Laboratorio Nacional de Energia e Geologia, and Pedro Cabral of Instituto Superior de Estatistica e Gestao de Informacao, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The winning project "Implementation of the INSPIRE Directive in digital geological map production in Portugal", focused on the elaboration of a harmonization approach applied to the geological datasets of Portugal in order to bring them in line with INSPIRE Implementing Rules.

Ms Pereira on receiving the award acknowledged, "The success of the project was the result of collaboration and support from others and the project development task was made easier through the availability of tools such as Enterprise Architect and the recently added ArcGIS profile."

Ken Harkin, Business Development Manager at Sparx Systems, who presented the award noted, "The excellent project submission from Laboratorio Nacional de Energia e Geologia clearly demonstrated the value of INSPIRE, and once again highlighted the essential role of academia in the geospatial industry capacity building effort." He added, "Sparx Systems is honored to support the INSPIRE initiative in this way as it is a practical demonstration our commitment to education outreach and industry training."

To support universities and teaching institutions who are addressing this challenge, Sparx Systems offers "non commercial" licenses of Enterprise Architect through the Academic License Program. For more information visit:http://www.sparxsystems.com/solutions/academic.html.