13 December 2013 – The OpenGeospatial Consortium (OGC®) Board of Directors, Staff and 473 public sector and privatesector members – government organizations, NGOs,corporations and universities around the world – congratulate Mr. Ebrahim Pooraziziof the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, winner of the inaugural OGCStudent App Challenge.

For his WalkYourPlace app, Mr. Poorazizi has won a Nexus Tablet donatedby Google. In addition, he will be sponsored by OGC to travel to one of the nextthree 2014 OGC Technical Committee meetings: March 2014 in Washington, DC, USA;September, 2014 in Calgary, Canada; December 2014 in Tokyo, Japan. At thatmeeting he will be officially recognized at a plenary session of the TechnicalCommittee. Also, Mr. Poorazizi's university, University of Calgary, willreceive a two-year free renewal of its current OGC membership.

Second Prize goes to TinySOS byMohammad Jazayeri, also from the University of Calgary. Honorable Mentions for Cultural Impact go to Jade Lacosse and Greg Sebastianfrom the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada for BC Place Names and Soo Jin Lee from Pukyong National Universityin South Korea for Android Map Application for People with Disabilities.

Ebrahim Poorazizi, Mohammed Jazayeri, Jade Lacosse and Soo Jin Lee eachhave a dedicated award page on the OGC Student App Challenge website featuring theirapplication.

Open standards fromthe OGC create opportunities for app developers to make all kinds of locationinformation available to users, independent of platform. Because most online sourcesof geographic information implement OGC standards, apps that implement OGCstandards have access to thousands of geospatial services and databases. TheOGC has launched the Student Map App Challenge to make entrepreneurial studentsaware of the enormous commercial and social potential of these open standards.

TheOGC is an international consortium of more than 470 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, wireless andlocation-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technologydevelopers to make geospatial information and services accessible and usefulwith any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGCwebsite at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

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