10 April 2013 – TheOpen Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces the OGC Student Map App Challenge,sponsored by Google, an OGC Principal Member. The Student Map App Challenge is acontest for students who have programming skills and an interest in maps andlocation services.
Open standards fromthe OGC unlock the potential of the “spatial Web,” creatingopportunities for app developers to make all kinds of location informationavailable to users, independent of platform. The OGC has launched the Student MapApp Challenge to make entrepreneurial students aware of the enormous social andcommercial potential of these open standards.
Three winningapplicants will receive an OGC Student Map App Challenge Award and theopportunity to have their apps featured on the OGC website and in other mediachannels. The first place winner will:
- Receive the award at their choice of the next year's OGC Technical Committee meetings (http://www.opengeospatial.org/event?category=ogctcpc), held quarterly in cities around the world. OGC will pay for travel, accommodations and meals.
- Receive a Nexus Tablet donated by Google.
- Receive a two-year OGC membership for the student's academic institution
- Have a dedicated award page on the OGC website and be cited in an OGC press release.
Applicants andtheir apps will receive the attention of the OGC's 480public sector and private sector members – government organizations, NGOs, corporations and universitiesaround the world.
Apps can make useof hundreds of public and private sector map data sources that are accessiblethrough server-side implementations of OGC standards. These include weather, navigation,demographics, sensors, webcams, commercial establishments, hydrology, birdcounts, accident statistics and many other kinds of data. The OGC Student Map App Challenge page provides search tools that can be used to find these existingOGC service instances. Most of these have no restrictions or few restrictionson their use, and thus they provide countless opportunities for mapping appsand location service apps.
Students don't needto rely on others' data, however. Sources of spatial data that are not nowaccessible through OGC's open interfaces and encodings can be made accessibleby students who develop server interfaces as well as client apps.
Students must register by 15 June 2013and submit their apps by 15 July 2013. Contestants and the public will benotified of the results on 30 August 2013.
TheOGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, governmentagencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensusprocess to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standardssupport interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wirelessand location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empowertechnology developers to make geospatial information and services accessibleand useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visitthe OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.
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