Peter Baumann, Professor of Computer Science at Jacobs University, has been honored with the Kenneth D. Gardels Award by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The OGC Board of Directors awarded the prize to Peter Baumann in recognition of his “significant contribution to the OGC’s essential role and mission in the global Information Technology community”.
Jeffrey K. Harris, Chairman of the OGC Board of Directors, said: “We wish to express our deep appreciation for the extraordinary contribution you have made to the OGC community and to people around the world who are the ultimate beneficiaries of improvements in the development, management and use of geoscientific data. Devoting your time and bringing your dedication, expertise, critical thinking and leadership to OGC working groups has resulted in significant and enduring advances in technical standards.”
Peter Baumann has been closely working with the Open Geospatial Consortium for more than ten years. He is editor of twelve adopted standards around the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) suite of Big Geo Data standards. Recently he has been instrumental in establishing a new Big Data Domain Working Group with the OGC which he also co-chairs. As a consequence of this engagement, Peter Baumann has been invited by the European Spatial Data Infrastructure initiative, INSPIRE, as well as ISO to provide expertise in geo service and query language standardization.
Peter Baumann’s research focuses on large-scale scientific information services, in particular: massive multi-dimensional data cubes. He has architected the rasdaman (“raster data manager”) technology which in fact has pioneered a new research field, Array Databases. With rasdaman, spatio-temporal sensor, image, simulation, and statistics data of any size can be accessed and explored interactively through Array SQL which offers a “what you get is what you need” interface to scientists, engineers, and other data users.
About the Kenneth D. Gardels Award The Award is named after Kenneth D. Gardels, a Research Specialist at the Center for Environmental Design Research (University of California), who passed away in 1999 at the height of his career. It was conceived to memorialize the spirit of a man with a passion for making the world a better place through open communication and the use of geospatial information technology to improve the quality of human life.
About OGC The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of 473 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface standards. OGC® Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT. The standards empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications.