Sparx Systems will sponsor the inaugural CEN/TC 287 Award for Academic Excellence within INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community). This award will promote academic excellence within the European geospatial community, specifically in development and deployment of interoperability standards. It provides an industry acknowledgement of the outstanding efforts of students and their mentors in this area of geomatics. The award was announced at the INSPIRE Conference 2010 in Kraków, Poland, and will be presented at the INSPIRE meeting in 2011 in Scotland.