The rasdaman Big Data technology, developed under the lead of Peter Baumann, Professor of Computer Science, has won the Big Data Challenge at this year’s prestigious Copernicus Masters competition. October 31, 2014

At the 2014 edition, the first to be held worldwide, the international Earth observation community awarded prizes worth a total of EUR 300,000 in nine categories during a festive ceremony held at the Berlin headquarters of Deutsche Telekom.

The application ideas submitted to the Copernicus Masters 2014 offer a glimpse into the next generation of Earth observations services in a wide array of business and societal sectors, including health, infrastructure, disaster management, agriculture and forestry, and environmental protection.

The rasdaman technology, which enables the storage and processing of multi-dimensional arrays (“raster data”) of unlimited size in a conventional database, was one of 170 submissions from 43 countries.

Prof. Baumann comments: “It is a great honor for our rasdaman technology to be recognized on such global scale”. Rasdaman is already in use by international satellite and climate data centers on hundreds of Terabytes, where it offers analyses of snow and ice cover, atmospheric and oceanography data, geophysical information, as well as satellite data about Mars.”

“This scalable array engine enables fast and user-friendly big data analysis that is optimised for geo-information from satellites and other sources”, says Dr Jurry de la Mar, Account Director Global Accounts & International Business at T-Systems International GmbH. “Among other industries, it is designed for oil and gas and insurance. While the engine significantly reduces the volume of data transferred and processed in complex queries, such queries can also easily be managed thanks to their basis on international standards.”

In his opening speech at the competition’s awards ceremony, ESA’s Earth Observation director Prof. Dr. Volker Liebig said: “The Copernicus Masters is an outstanding platform for promoting user uptake and raising awareness of the benefits of the Copernicus data and information,” declared. “I am pleased about the high quality exhibited by this year’s ideas which reflect the potential Earth observation data and global environmental information present in countless new areas of application.”

This year’s Copernicus Masters awards ceremony was accompanied by the Satellite Masters Conference for the first time, which gave the winners the chance to present their ideas to the global Earth observation and navigation industry and share innovations in aerospace technologies and services.

For the complete winner description see: Copernicus Masters 2014 Winners

More info on the conference: www.satellite-masters-conference.eu

More info on the rasdaman technology: www.rasdaman.org