Poles awarded for application Art4EuropeOn 7-8 June the Polish edition of hackathon was held in Poznań, one of a series of four meetings of IT engineers from around the world called Hack4Europe. Around 30 software developers participate in each of these events. During three hacking sessions they try to create interesting applications which will be able to use data collected by Europeana Foundation in an innovative way. Europeana provides special API, by using which it is possible to download data collected by many digital libraries and museums in Europe including Polish organizations of this type. Developers received access key to this API during the meeting and attempted to astonish the Committee. Software applications were created in three categories:
- software of the highest business value,
- software of the greatest social value
- and the most innovative one.
In the first category the winner was a team from one of the IT companies from Poznań, which prepared the application for cell phones named “Art4Europe”. It is the application for the Android system created by SaveUp Team represented by:
- Tomasz Grzywalski (iTraff Technology),
- Jakub Jurkiewicz (iTraff Technology),
- Jakub Porzuczek (Programa, iTraff Technology),
- Marcin Szajek (Programa, iTraff Technology).
However, this is not all. Today the organizer of the event (Europeana Foundation) announced final results of Hack4Europe contest. Organizers invited the winning team to Brussels to receive the award from the vice-president of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes for the project of the highest commercial potential in the whole international contest. Art4Europe is an application which makes easier for the user to gain their knowledge about historical monuments. During our visit at the museum we can take a picture of a painting and the application will download data for us referring to selected painting by using very sophisticated methods of comparing pictures straight from Europeana API. The information will be presented to the user in original language as well as translated into the user’s language and what is more – it will be transformed into audio files which will make the process of gaining knowledge about culture much more pleasant.
Application might bring to mind Google Goggles a little bit. But it can prove to be more accurate. Goggles is a more universal search engine based on photos. Art4Europe application can only be used for advanced image recognition. This doesn’t change the fact that we should be very proud of our developers.
Let me remind you that the team has developed another interesting mobile application SaveUp. At this moment the application is available for iPhone, but the authors are planning a version for the Android system. When will it be? There is no date given so far.
