Slovenian Company Sinergise Wins the 2016 Copernicus Masters Competition

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Sentinel Hub Blog

5 min readOct 25, 2016

Madrid, 25 October 2016: Sinergise Ltd triumphs in the 2016 Copernicus Masters Competition with its path-breaking satellite image web service — the Sentinel Hub. The service revolutionizes access to Earth observation satellite imagery, reducing the time required to visualize and exploit the data from hours down to seconds. The international Copernicus Masters prize has been awarded annually since 2011 by AZO on behalf of the European Space Agency.

Sinergise came out on top in the competition’s T-Systems Open Telekom Cloud Challenge and went on to edge out the winners of six other categories for the grand prize. Sinergise has been working in the earth observation field for more than 10 years and was excited when the Copernicus project launched Sentinel 2 satellites. The satellites promise weekly, free, high-resolution data worldwide. However, while attempting to get Sentinel 2 data to their customers in Europe, Africa and Asia, Sinergise realized that current technologies were not up to the challenge, primarily due to the massive amount of data that needed to be transferred. Sentinel Hub was born out of the desire to remedy this problem. Computationally intensive, repetitive and monotonous tasks were no longer an issue. 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. The time required to visualize and exploit the data has been reduced from hours down to seconds. Now Sinergise’s clients can stop wasting time on the tedious shuffling of pixels and can focus on building added value services for end-users instead — farmers, disaster relief operators and others. Having the complete earth observation data archive at its disposal, Sinergise is able to use machine learning to find patterns in the data, further enhancing its use.

NDVI view of farms (left) and Nardo Ring, Italy (right)

View more Sentinel imagery

The Copernicus Masters’ grand prize was presented to Sinergise’s head of the Sentinel Hub group, Bojan Šernek, by Dr. Josef Aschbacher, Director of Earth Observation Programmes within the European Space Agency.

“According to a recent PWC study, Copernicus has become the third largest data supplier in the world. Sentinel data access is full, free and open to all users world-wide. Sentinel Hub significantly simplifies the way users can access and process satellite data,” explained Dr. Josef Aschbacher at the awards ceremony in Madrid. “With applications like these, the 2016 Copernicus Masters competition has once again clearly demonstrated its potential to drive the innovative use of Earth observation data and make the Copernicus programme accessible to new user groups.”

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 more than 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

Sentinel Hub provides unprecedented access to earth observation data, focused on Sentinel satellites but also supporting other sources such as Landsat, Planet and others. It uses Amazon Web Services cloud and innovative methods to efficiently process and distribute data in a matter of seconds. It can be integrated into any mapping application for web application allowing for any easy-to-use and cost-effective way to exploit the data. It removes the major hassle of downloading, archiving and processing petabytes of data and simply makes the full and global archive easily available immediately via web services. Application developers can focus on added value services and end-user applications rather than having to deal with the complexity of remote sensing data. Sentinel Hub will increase the uptake of the Copernicus programme.

Sinergise

Sinergise is a Slovenian software company focused on the development of large-scale GIS solutions in the field of land administration and agriculture support, including cloud based GIS — Geopedia. It is headquartered in Ljubljana, working with clients from all over the world — from nearby countries such as Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro to France, the United Kingdom, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Mauritius. Its solutions are used by more than 2 million people annually and help governments manage assets worth many trillions of EUR.