- April 5, 2007
- Posted by: EARSC
- Category: Members News
GeoVille and University of Wales, Aberystwyth Announced as Winners of Definiens GMES Innovation & Research Awards 2007 — Recognition for most innovative use of Definiens Enterprise Image Intelligence?
Suite to provide highly automated services for GMES initiative
Definiens, the number one Enterprise Image Intelligence company, has awarded six organizations with the Definiens GMES Innovation & Research Awards 2007. The top-ranking companies received awards and prizes at a ceremony at Lake Starnberg near Munich last week. GeoVille was selected as the winner in the innovation category; the University of Wales, Aberystwyth was chosen as the winner in the research category.
The winners for each of the two categories were selected by a committee consisting of Mark Doherty, Head of Earth Observation Exploitation and Services Division of the European Space Agency, Christine Bernot, Scientific officer, Space Research and Development of the European Commission and Prof. Gerd Binnig, Nobel Laureate and founder of Definiens. The main evaluation criteria were innovation leading to increased automation and standardization, as well as the GMES service roll-out, customer satisfaction and potential cost savings.
“The Definiens GMES Innovation & Research Award is an excellent initiative that highlights brilliant examples where research teams and industry are using Definiens innovative technology to achieve standards of quality and efficiency in GMES services that would not be possible otherwise,” said Mark Doherty, Head of Earth Observation Exploitation and Services Division of the European Space Agency.
Definiens GMES Innovation & Research Award 2007 winners:
Innovation Award: This award recognizes excellence in developing profitable, highly automated operational GMES services based on the Definiens Enterprise Image Intelligence.
The winner is Austrian-based GeoVille, a company which specializes in providing a wide range of value-added services for remotely-sensed data and GIS applications to commercial and government organizations worldwide. GeoVille has developed a highly automated and standardized urban landcover mapping service which can be rolled out to serve government bodies and European agencies providing highly accurate and harmonized mapping products across country borders. GeoVille is proud to have been selected as the winner of the Innovation Award,commented Jorgen Weichselbaum, Head of the Technical Department at GeoVille. We appreciate the support we have received from Definiens; their technology is critical in serving our customers and achieving our current level of success. GeoVille is honored to play a key role in GMES services for land applications related to spatial planning and urban mapping. Our efforts underline the overall goal of GMES for an effective, operational program that will deliver harmonized and standardized applications to regional, national and European customers for cross-border usage.
Research Award: This award recognizes an institute which performed superior research based on the Definiens Enterprise Image Intelligence Suite.
The winner is the University of Wales, Aberystwyth which has developed a cost-efficient mapping of natural habitats based on multi-temporal satellite imagery. The fully automated image analysis provides detailed and highly accurate information about Welsh habitats. The application has very high potential for successful deployment in other areas within Great Britain, possibly covering the entire country. “Organizations such as the Countryside Council for Wales (CCW) need to map and monitor habitats and landscapes to see the effects of agricultural policies and the response of biodiversity to climate change,” said Dr. Richard Lucas, Reader at the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. “The use of the Definiens Enterprise Image Intelligence Suite gives us a remote sensing-based method that captures our intuitive knowledge of landscape ecology and applies this at a regional scale. This gives us results we can understand and update in a natural way. We are pleased that this important work has been recognized by the Definiens GMES Research Award 2007.”
Thomas Heydler, CEO of Definiens commented, It fills us with great satisfaction to work with these first-class organizations. All the awardees contributed outstanding GMES services based on Definiens technology. We hope that the Award becomes a catalyst inspiring other successful and committed organizations to improve the environment and security for the civilian population in Europe.
In the research category, awards were also given to the TU Bergakademie from Germany and Z_GIS of the University of Salzburg Austria. In the innovation category, awards were handed to Eurosense from Belgium and Planetek Italia. The awards recognize organizations that have delivered exceptional GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) services based on the Enterprise Image Intelligence capabilities provided by Definiens.
GMES is a European initiative which aims at developing and implementing information services based on earth observation and ancillary data. The services are used by environmental agencies, local, regional and national authorities, civilian protection organizations, etc. in dealing with environmental and security issues. New observation techniques and data analysis permit these groups to better anticipate potential threats, to intervene quickly and to increase intervention efficiency.
Definiens in Earth Sciences
Definiens supports organizations focused on Earth Sciences to analyze remote sensing imagery which supports the sustainable management of natural resources, future-proof infrastructure planning and defense and security applications. Definiens enables organizations to correlate image analysis with a variety of intelligence sources, providing deeper insights and faster results for better decisions. Definiens applications are highly scalable, integrate easily into existing environments and support all types and combinations of modern spaceborne and airborne sensors, including SAR, Lidar, panchromatic, infrared, single channel, multispectral and hyperspectral sensors.
About Definiens
Definiens is the number one Enterprise Image Intelligence company for analyzing and interpreting images on every scale, from microscopic cell structures to satellite images. The Definiens Cognition Network Technology?, developed by Nobel laureate Prof. Gerd Binnig and his team, is an advanced and robust technology designed to fulfill the image analysis requirements of the Life and Earth sciences markets. The technology is modeled on the powerful human cognitive processes of perception to extract value from images. Definiens provides organizations with faster image analysis results, allowing deeper insights enabling better business decisions. Definiens is headquartered in Munich, Germany and has offices throughout the United States. Further information is available at www.definiens.com
