Slovenian Company Sinergise Wins the 2016 Copernicus Masters Competition

25 Oct 16

Sinergise Ltd – providing a streamlined solution for distribution of satellite imagery - has been named this year's overall winner of the international Earth observation competition Copernicus Masters, organised by European Space Agency and AZO.

Copernicus Masters competition

Sinergise came out on top in the competition's T-Systems Open Telekom Cloud Challenge and went on to edge out the winners of seven other categories for the grand prize. Sinergise has been working in the earth observation field for more than 10 years and was excited when Copernicus project launched Sentinel-2 satellites that promises weekly free and open high-resolution data worldwide. However, trying to get the data to their customers in Europe, Africa and Asia, Sinergise realized that current technologies are not up to this challenge due to massive amount of data. A group of people in Sinergise has decided to do something about it and Sentinel Hub was born - solving problems, related to compute intensive, repetitive and monotonous tasks. Sentinel Hub hides the complexity of archiving, processing and distribution of satellite data behind a set of standard web services, which can be easily integrated in any desktop, web or mobile mapping application. Now its clients can stop spending time on boring shuffling of pixels and can focus on building added value services for end-users instead - farmers, disaster relief operators and others. Having complete earth observation data archive on disposal Sinergise is able to use machine learning to find patterns in the data.

Antarctica

Bahamas

NDVI view of farms

Nardo Ring, Italy

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The Copernicus Masters' grand prize was presented to Sinergise's head of Sentinel Hub group, Bojan Šernek, by Dr Josef Aschbacher, Director of Earth Observation Programmes within the European Space Agency. "Building Radar's innovative combination of Earth observation data including Sentinel-2 optical data, machine learning, and data mining has created an all-new service for the construction industry", Aschbacher stated. "It also clearly demonstrates both the usefulness Copernicus provides to a wide range of sectors and the Copernicus Masters ability to discover market-oriented applications of Earth observation data."

Sentinel Playground
Since 2011, the Copernicus Masters has recognised each year's best ideas for making innovative use of such data. The 2016 edition received more than 200 entries from close to 50 countries around the world. The applications submitted this year offered a fantastic glimpse to the next generation of Earth observation services along the entire value chain.

Sentinel Hub provides unprecedented access to earth observation data, focused on Sentinel satellites but also supporting other sources such as Landsat, Planet and more. It is facilitating advanced Amazon Web Services cloud technology and innovative methods to efficiently process and distribute data in a matter of seconds without compute intensive pre-processing, resulting in easy-to-use and cost efficient way to exploit the data in any mapping application or integrating them in web application. Therefore it removes the major hassle of downloading, archiving and processing petabytes of data and simply makes the full and global archive available via web services. Application developers can focus to added value services and end-user applications rather than dealing with complexity of remote sensing data. Sentinel Hub will increase an uptake of Copernicus programme.

Sinergise is a Slovene software company focused on developing of large-scale GIS solutions in the field of land administration, support to agriculture and cloud GIS - Geopedia. With its headquarters in Ljubljana it is working with clients from all over the world - from nearby countries such as Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro to France, United Kingdom, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Mauritius. Its solutions are used by more than 2 million people annually and are helping governments managing assets worth many trillions of EUR.

For an overview of this year's winners in all categories, please visit www.winners.copernicus-masters.com.