10 April 2013 -- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces the OGC Student Map App Challenge, sponsored by Google, an OGC Principal Member. The Student Map App Challenge is a contest for students who have programming skills and an interest in maps and location services.

Open standards from the OGC unlock the potential of the "spatial Web," creating opportunities for app developers to make all kinds of location information available to users, independent of platform. The OGC has launched the Student Map App Challenge to make entrepreneurial students aware of the enormous social and commercial potential of these open standards.

Three winning applicants will receive an OGC Student Map App Challenge Award and the opportunity to have their apps featured on the OGC website and in other media channels. The first place winner will:
• Receive the award at their choice of the next year's OGC Technical Committee meetings ( http://www.opengeospatial.org/event?category=ogctcpc), held quarterly in cities around the world. OGC will pay for travel, accommodations and meals.
• Receive a Nexus Tablet donated by Google.
• Receive a two-year OGC membership for the student's academic institution
• Have a dedicated award page on the OGC website and be cited in an OGC press release.

Applicants and their apps will receive the attention of the OGC's 480 public sector and private sector members – government organizations, NGOs, corporations and universities around the world.

Apps can make use of hundreds of public and private sector map data sources that are accessible through server-side implementations of OGC standards. These include weather, navigation, demographics, sensors, webcams, commercial establishments, hydrology, bird counts, accident statistics and many other kinds of data. The OGC Student Map App Challenge page provides search tools that can be used to find these existing OGC service instances. Most of these have no restrictions or few restrictions on their use, and thus they provide countless opportunities for mapping apps and location service apps.

Students don't need to rely on others' data, however. Sources of spatial data that are not now accessible through OGC's open interfaces and encodings can be made accessible by students who develop server interfaces as well as client apps.

Students must register by 15 June 2013 and submit their apps by 15 July 2013. Contestants and the public will be notified of the results on 30 August 2013.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 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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