Recently, at the 58th plenary meeting of the Geographic Information Technology Committee of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO/TC 211), Professor Bai Yuqi from the Department of Earth System Science (DESS), Tsinghua University was awarded the "ISO Excellence Award" jointly by the ISO Central Secretariat and ISO/TC 211 in recognition of his outstanding contributions as a convener of working groups and a leader of standard projects. This was the first time that an expert in the field of geographic information from China won this award.

Prof. Bai Yuqi is the convener of the 7th Working Group of ISO/TC 211 and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Climate Change, and also the liaison of ISO/TC 211 and the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). As the first expert in China to be the convener of the working group in ISO/TC 211, he organized the members of the 7th Working Group to carry out a large amount of standard revision work, having completed the formulation of standards such as the address (ISO 19160-4:2023, ISO 19160-2:2023), ontology (ISO 19150-6:2023) and metadata (ISO 19113), and leading nine other standards in progress.

As a project leader, Prof. Bai Yuqi led Jin Meng and other doctoral students in the DESS to cooperate with experts from the United States, Canada, Germany and Australia, and put forward a coding scheme combining semantic and grammatical information, which solved the heterogeneous problems of existing geographical positioning models, covering seven categories, including optics, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), lidar and sonar. This scheme has now attained the status of an ISO international standard, titled “Geographic information: Imagery sensor models for geo-positioning” (ISO/TS 19130-3:2022), which was officially launched in 2022. This is the first ISO international standard completed by Tsinghua University as a leader in the field of geographic information. This standard can promote the accurate and rapid fusion of multi-source remote sensing data and the reliability test of geographical positioning information, enhance the modularity and standardization of geographical positioning information processing of remote sensing images, and enhance the compatibility and robustness of remote sensing ground system software.

The "ISO Excellence Award" was established in 2015 to recognize experts, project leaders or conveners of working groups who have made outstanding contributions to the compilation and revision of ISO international standards. This was the first award issued by ISO/TC 211 since its establishment 30 years ago. A Chinese expert winning this honor indicates that the international standardization of geographic information in China has been highly recognized by ISO.

Professor Bai Yuqi's ISO Excellence Award Certificate

Head of ISO/TC 211 Committee (Mats Ahlin, first from left), Chairman of ISO/TC 211 Committee (Peter Parslow, second from left) and Secretary of ISO/TC 211 Committee (Christine Allanson, first from right) took a photo with Professor Bai Yuqi (second from right).