Maps Make Sense for Salzburg 2015 Announcing the winners of the Esri Ireland Annual Map Challenge

This year celebrated the fourth of Esri Ireland’s Annual Map Challenge, a competition which has grown organically and continues to impress both Esri Ireland and Esri Inc.

Esri Ireland broadened the competition this year with 5 different categories of entry along with 5 prizes to the Esri European User Conference in the majestic city of Salzburg -  The challenge;  to tell a compelling story using maps.

Our panel of judges including Eamonn Doyle, CTO Esri Ireland; Rupert Essinger, Esri’s Story Maps Team and Muiris DeBuitleir; GIS enthusiast and long-time Esri user have been deliberating and made their decisions this afternoon.

The Overall Winner

We are delighted to announce the overall winner of Esri Ireland’s “Maps Make Sense for Salzburg” Annual Map Challenge 2015 goes to Rosita Mahony, SPACEial North West for her Story Map “Ireland’s Call – to return its Global Diaspora Home”, along with Steven Boyd, Daragh McDonagh, Jon Hawkins and Barry Doyle who will be all travelling to Salzburg on October 13th to experience the Esri “event experience” first-hand.

“Stories are fundamental to how we communicate as human beings.   We had asked for a visually attractive and compelling story map; with good multimedia content to make the subject matter interesting understandable and engaging. Rosita’s map had all of these elements and told a great story”. The amount of data analysis and mining done to produce this map is truly impressive. The outputs of this analysis lend themselves to map based presentation and I think that has been used to very good effect” commented Eamonn Doyle, CTO and Judge from Esri Ireland.

“It’s integration of mapping and graphics is excellent.” said Muiris DeBuitleir.

This year’s 5 Winners:

Eamonn, Rupert and Muiris wanted to congratulate all five winners you can check out their winning maps below:

• Rosita Mahony; Ireland’s Call
• Steven Boyd; Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914 -1917
• Daragh McDonagh; Hills of Donegal 3D Tour
• Jon Hawkins; Waterford Viking Triangle
• Barry Doyle; Loughrey Triathlon Charity Map

Paul Synnott, County Manager of Esri Ireland “On behalf of Esri Ireland we'd like to congratulate our five winners, the standard and quality of Storymap entries never ceases to amaze or impress. We had 24 entries to the competition this year and would like to sincerely thank all of the entrants who supported the challenge. It's very encouraging to see how customers are using ArcGIS Online and the vast array of Story Map templates to enhance a user’s online experience”.

Esri Ireland will be profiling each of the winning maps on line and via social media every day next week –watch this space.

Maps Make Sense for Christmas Celebration, Dublin 3rd December 2015

On 3rd December at the National Gallery of Ireland Esri Ireland will be hosting a Maps Make Sense for Christmas afternoon event.  It will pay homage to all of the entries to this year’s competition; showcasing the winners and hearing directly from them on their experience in Salzburg.  This is a great way of keeping in touch with your fellow map makers and to see what the community is creating through story maps.

If you’d like to register your place please email Joanne and Katrina at mapsmakesense@esri-ireland.ie