IEEE’s Pervasive Computing’s Test of Time Award for OpenStreetMap original paper

29 Jun 2026

As WeeklyOSM 830 reminded us last week:

Muki Haklay, Professor of Geographical Information Science in the UCL Department of Geography, and UCL alumnus Patrick Weber, have won the IEEE’s Pervasive Computing’s Test of Time Award for their 2008 paper on OpenStreetMap. The award honours the most influential papers that have had a lasting impact on pervasive computing over the past 25 years. Over the eighteen years since Muki’s paper was published the OpenStreetMap project, which was launched at UCL in 2004, has evolved into critical digital infrastructure that supports research, humanitarian response, navigation systems, smart cities, and countless location-based services.

This is quite a nice coincidence with the event that we will be running next week as part of this year’s London Data Week. Our Mapping festival event will have three parallel sessions to get your mapping curiosity satisfied.

It will include: mapping activities where you can help humanitarian aid organizations to map areas before they go there to help; workshops to learn how to use OpenStreetMap data to obtain insights about a particular location; and an exploratory activity around campus to improve the quality of the map information about UCL.

If you are interested on any (or all!) of those activities, join us on July 7th, from 14:00 at the main campus.