Friday, April 22, 2011

Bernhard Vockner receiving EDC Salzburg 'Best Student Award'!


This year’s annual ESRI Development Center 'best student award' nomination goes to
     Bernhard VOCKNER
for his MSc thesis in Applied Geoinformatics titled "Application development for mobile environmental data acquisition – a prototype for Berchtesgaden National Park"

In cooperation with Berchtesgaden National Park and the Research Studio iSPACE Bernhard Vockner developed a solution for simple, workflow-centric field data acquisition with mobile devices on ArcGIS Mobile. Decisive for this choice was the enhanced performance of Smartphones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), facilitating advanced mobile applications for environmental data acquisition. With their multitude of functions, many currently available products are tailored for expert users. However, numerous potential end users are domain experts having little or no prior GIS-knowledge.

Based on the principle that ‘GIS must be simple to use’, a mobile and context-sensitive prototype application was developed. Above all, the application features intuitive simplicity of operations adapted to the key requirement of automated recording of specific spatial information by domain experts (e.g. zoologists). Thus, technical functions on the client side focus clearly on users’ key requirements. A requirements analysis demonstrated that in this case, point or line feature collection via GPS, intuitive attribute data input and photographic documentation for each record were most frequently requested by the target group and therefore implemented in the mobile application. To validate the usability of the application, a usability testing procedure was carried out.

Congratulations to Bernhard Vockner’s for receiving this outstanding recognition for this thesis submitted in 2010 at the University of Salzburg Centre for Geoinformatics and graded as ‘excellent’.

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