The inaugural CEN/TC 287 Annual Award for Academic Excellence within INSPIRE, was awarded on the 29th June at the 2011 INSPIRE Conference in Edinburgh.

Sparx Systems presented the award to the winner Antoine Gourlay, from Ecole Centrale de Nantes, and his mentor Dr. Erwan Bocher.

This Award is an annual recognition of excellence within the INSPIRE community and an award for academic contributions to the development and adoption of geospatial standards through the use of Enterprise Architect, itself an award winning modeling tool from Sparx Systems.

The project from Ecole Centrale de Nantes was chosen as it deals with the implementation of a web processing service in a concrete use case - using an existing SDI and GIS to facilitate a new GI specification (WPS) in a practical way.

It demonstrates originality and technical quality and applies the INSPIRE principles for an application on a local level, while implementing a new specification with clearly presented results.

Information about entering the 2012 awards will be published on the Community site later this year.