Open Spring INSPIRE Hackathon 2021

The Open Spring INSPIRE Hackathon 2021 was a fully virtual event held from March to May 2021, organised by Plan4all. This hackathon focused on fostering innovation in areas such as agriculture, environment, transport, tourism, geospatial applications, remote sensing, and GNSS technologies.

🎯 Objectives

• Promote the development of digital innovation hubs (DIHs) and smart solutions in agriculture and rural development.
  
  
• Encourage the use of open data, Earth Observation (EO), and geospatial technologies.
  
  
• Support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through innovative applications.
  
  

🧩 Challenges

The hackathon featured 11 distinct challenges, each addressing specific issues:

1. How to Use and Improve OLU 2.0.0: Verifying and testing the OpenLandUse database for various applications such as spatial planning and investment evaluation.
   
   
2. Regional Attractiveness: Developing methods to assess and visualise regional attractiveness using statistical data and machine learning techniques.
   
   
3. Analysis of Drought Conditions for Selected Use-Cases: Applying drought indices to assess drought risk using weather simulation models and EO data.
   
   
4. Analytical Map of Traffic Accidents in Czechia: Creating an analytical map utilising the GLayer engine to visualise traffic accidents.
   
   
5. SmartAfriHub III – African Agricultural Water Security: Building a community to support smart farming practices in Africa.
   
   
6. Analysis of Sentinel 2 and Sentinel 1 Time Series for Agriculture: Comparing different indices and developing web-based environments for data comparison in agriculture.
   
   
7. Interactive Collaborative Data Capturing at Scale – Technology and Business Models: Enhancing the scalability of MapWhiteboard technology and exploring viable business models.
   
   
8. AgroInfo Application: Designing a web-based application that integrates various agricultural information sources into an easy-to-interpret environment.
   
   
9. Agrihub Slovakia: Establishing a Slovak Agricultural Innovation Hub to promote sustainable and competitive agriculture.
   
   
10. Evaluation of OSM for Traffic Modelling: Assessing the suitability of OpenStreetMap data for traffic model creation.
    
    
11. From Smart Points of Interest Towards Sustainable Points of Interest: Developing a robust pipeline for transforming OSM data into sustainable points of interest and integrating them with other datasets.
    
    

🏆 Results

The hackathon concluded with an award ceremony on 17 June 2021, recognising the top projects:

• 1st Place: Interactive Collaborative Data Capturing at Scale – Technology and Business Models
  
  
• 2nd Place: Agrihub Slovakia
  
  
• 3rd Place: SmartAfriHub III – African Agricultural Water Security
  
  

Additionally, a public vote highlighted the following projects:

• 1st Place: How to Use and Improve OLU 2.0.0
  
  
• 2nd Place: Regional Attractiveness
  
  
• 3rd Place: Analysis of Drought Conditions for Selected Use-Cases
  
  

🏢 Organisers and Supporters

The event was organised by Plan4all and supported by various partners and projects, including:

• SmartAgriHubs
  
• EO4Agri
  
• PoliRural
  
• SIEUSOIL
  
• EUXDAT
  
• AFarCloud
  
• SmartAfriHub
  
• GODAN
  
• RCMRD
  
• NextGEOSS
  
• WeObserve
  
• Stargate
  
• Demeter
  
• RDA Europe 4.0