Solenix

Last Friday and Saturday, more than 50 developers met at the Media Quarter Marx in Vienna for the Copernicus Data Hackathon. This event was organised by INiTS, the business incubator of the local university, and its goal was to create and prototype concepts for innovative services using Copernicus data.

Solenix proudly supported this event by mentoring the participants on Web technologies and WebWorldWind, the 3D virtual globe jointly developed by ESA and NASA. Our Yann, who leads the ESA-funded development team in Europe of this initiative, provided a 30-minute-crash-course on WebWorldWind and offered his expertise to the participants during the two-day Hackathon.

The first morning was dedicated to introduce the data processing infrastructure and getting the teams started on how to use WebWorldWind as visualisation platform. Most of the teams built a web site and about half of them used WebWorldWind for their visualisations.

The ten participating teams came up with and developed very diverse applications ranging from finding the best places to expand bee colonies or assessing field floods to using satellite data in education. To everybody’s surprise, there were not one, but two winning teams, as the jury was unable to decide on a single winner. The EUR 7’500-worth prize was split between the two winning teams: CROpernicus and Kopf. Congratulations to both teams and thanks to all participants, mentors, jury members and organisers for making this event a success!