Sparx Systems Sponsors CEN/TC 287 Award for Academic Excellence in INSPIRE

CRESWICK, AUSTRALIA--(Marketwired - July 16, 2013) - Sparx Systems, the leading vendor of modeling tools based on open standards, sponsored and presented the CEN/TC 287 Award for Academic Excellence and Innovation in INSPIRE at the recent INSPIRE Annual Conference in Florence.

The award now in its third year, aims to promote academic excellence within the European geospatial community. This year the award was won by Aurete Pereira and Gabriel Luís of Laboratório Nacional de Energia e Geologia, and Pedro Cabral of Instituto Superior de Estatística e Gestão de Informação, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The winning project "Implementation of the INSPIRE Directive in digital geological map production in Portugal", focused on the elaboration of a harmonization approach applied to the geological datasets of Portugal in order to bring them in line with INSPIRE Implementing Rules.

Ms Pereira on receiving the award acknowledged, "The success of the project was the result of collaboration and support from others and the project development task was made easier through the availability of tools such as Enterprise Architect and the recently added ArcGIS profile."

Ken Harkin, Business Development Manager at Sparx Systems, who presented the award noted, "The excellent project submission from Laboratório Nacional de Energia e Geologia clearly demonstrated the value of INSPIRE, and once again highlighted the essential role of academia in the geospatial industry capacity building effort." He added, "Sparx Systems is honored to support the INSPIRE initiative in this way as it is a practical demonstration our commitment to education outreach and industry training."

To support universities and teaching institutions who are addressing this challenge, Sparx Systems offers "non commercial" licenses of Enterprise Architect through the Academic License Program. For more information visit: http://www.sparxsystems.com/solutions/academic.html.

About Sparx Systems

Sparx Systems is an Australian company specializing in high performance and scalable visual modeling tools for the planning, design and construction of software intensive systems.

With customers in industries ranging from aerospace and automotive engineering to finance, defense, government, entertainment and telecommunications, Sparx Systems has won five consecutive SD Times awards and is the leading vendor of innovative solutions based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its related specifications. A Contributing Member of the Object Management Group (OMG), Sparx Systems is committed to realizing the potential of model-driven development based on open standards.

The company's flagship product, Enterprise Architect, has received numerous accolades since its commercial release in August, 2000, including two Jolt and Visual Studio Magazine Reader's Choice Merit awards. Now at version 10, Enterprise Architect is the design tool of choice for over 300,000 registered users world-wide.