Best Paper 2000

The U.V. Helava Award, sponsored by Elsevier Science B.V. and LH Systems, LLC, is a prestigious new ISPRS Award, which was established to encourage and stimulate submission of high quality scientific papers by individual authors or groups to the ISPRS Journal, to promote and advertise the Journal, and to honour the outstanding contributions of Dr. Uuno V. Helava to research and development in Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

The Award is presented to authors of the best paper, written in English and published exclusively in the ISPRS Journal during the four-year period from January of a Congress year, to December of the year prior to the next Congress. The Award consists of a monetary grant of SFr. 10,000 and a plaque. A five-member jury, comprising experts of high scientific standing, whose expertise covers the main topics included in the scope of the Journal, evaluates the papers. For each year of the four-year evaluation period, the best paper is selected, and among these four papers, the one to receive the U.V. Helava Award.

The second U.V. Helava Award will be presented at the 20th ISPRS Congress, Istanbul, 12-23 July 2004. The five-member jury appointed by the ISPRS Council evaluated the 28 papers of Volume 55 (2000) and announced its decision for the Best Paper.
The winner of the 2000 Best Paper is:

  Fuzzy spatial objects and their dynamics

Martien Molenaar ¹ , Tao Cheng ²

¹ International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), P.O. Box 6, 7500AA Enschede, Netherlands

²2 Joint Laboratory for GeoInformation Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong, P.R. China

Jury's rationale for the paper selection

This paper constitutes a continuation of previous own work on fuzzy spatial objects extending it to their evolution and dynamics. It is an interesting, innovative work with high theoretical value, formalising the uncertainty of dynamic spatial objects. The potential and practical significance of the theoretical concepts for change and trend analysis of fuzzy spatial objects, especially in environmental monitoring, is high and this needs to be verified by further practical tests. The paper is well written and clearly presented and includes a real-world application.

In the name of the ISPRS and the U.V. Helava Award jury, I would like to congratulate the authors for this distinction and thank them for their contribution. I would also like to thank the sponsors of the Award, and the jury members for their hard work and thorough evaluation.

Emmanuel P. Baltsavias

Editor-in-Chief, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing