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

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

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

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

Open standards from the OGC create opportunities for app developers to make all kinds of location information available to users, independent of platform. Because most online sources of geographic information implement OGC standards, apps that implement OGC standards have access to thousands of geospatial services and databases.

The OGC has launched the Student Map App Challenge to make entrepreneurial students aware of the enormous commercial and social potential of these open standards. The OGC is an international consortium of more than 470 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact. 



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