[OSGeo-Discuss] eHarta geospatial project awarded at Open Data Challenge

[Vasile Craciunescu]

Dear all,

I'm happy to announce that eHarta collaborative project[1], initiated by 
geo-spatial.org and Romanian OSGeo Chapter, won the “Better Data Award” 
at “Open Data Challenge”[2]. The prize was awarded at the Digital Agenda 
Assembly[3], being held in Brussels on 16th and 17th June 2011, by the 
European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes.

Organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation[4] and the Open Forum 
Academy[5] under the auspices of the Share-PSI initiative[6], the Open 
Data Challenge invited designers, developers, journalists, researchers 
and the general public to come up with useful, valuable or interesting 
uses for open public data. It attracted 430 entries from across the EU. 
Entries were invited in four categories for prize money totalling €20 
000. The categories were fully blown apps, ideas, visualisations and 
liberated public sector datasets. The winners were selected by open data 
experts, including the inventor of the worldwide web Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

eHarta[7] is a collection of thousands of old georeferenced maps, 
published and documented with the help of the community. The eHarta maps 
are freely available for download[8] as georeferenced files and 
accessible through a number of web services that fit a broad range of 
users (e.g. Zoomify tiles or KML files for ordinary users; OGC compliant 
geospatial web services like WMS/WMTS/WMS-C/TMS/CSW for users with 
advanced geospatial skills). A webmapping application, which integrates 
all the old maps published within eHarta project, was implemented on 
geo-spatial.org[9]. Of course, everything was done with free and open 
source software.

Fore some more technical details I'll try to setup a page on OSGeo Wiki. 
A entry for this project was also added in the Galleries. By the way, 
there is a lot of spam here. Someone should clear all the junk entries.

Best regards,
Vasile

[1] http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/eHarta?lang=en
[2] http://opendatachallenge.org/
[3] http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/daa/index_en.htm
[4] http://okfn.org/
[5] http://www.openforumacademy.org/
[6] http://share-psi.eu/
[7] http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/eHarta?lang=en
[8] http://earth.unibuc.ro/harti/download-planuri-tragere.php?lang=en
[9] http://www.earth.unibuc.ro/harti/index.php?lang=en


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Vasile Crăciunescu
geo-spatial.org: An elegant place for sharing geoKnowledge & geoData
http://www.geo-spatial.org
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/geo-spatial