CReSIS student researcher Kyle Purdon was awarded first prize at the University of Kansas’ (KU) 2013 GIS Day for a paper on an open source field deployable spatial data infrastructure.

"Winning this competition is validation from my peers, the local community, and professionals in the field,” said Purdon, a graduate student in the KU Geography Department.

His paper, “OpenPolarServer: An open source, field deployable, spatial data infrastructure,” won the $300 first prize. The paper was one of eight student papers that were accepted in the GIS Day competition. KU’s GIS Day student was held on November 20, 2013.

“Taking the system development route in the Geography department,” which Purdon says is more of a computer science topic, “has been challenging, but awards like this validate my efforts in the field and give me confidence as I continue to develop the OpenPolarServer infrastructure at CReSIS.”

GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, integrates technologies to analyze, interpret and understand geographic data.

“The OpenPolarServer (OPS) project aims to develop a free and open source spatial data infrastructure (SDI) to store, manage, analyze, and distribute data collected by CReSIS,” according to Purdon’s paper.