Mr. Robert Burkhardt, former Army Geospatial Center director and the Army's first Geospatial Information officer was awarded the U. S. Army Engineer Association's prestigious 2016 Gold de Fleury medal for contributions that “exemplify boldness, courage and commitment to a strong national defense,” says the association that represents the service's active-duty and retired engineers.

As the highest honor given by the regiment, the Gold de Fleury medal is named after François ...de Fleury, a French engineer who served the Continental Army during the American Revolution, and who displayed valiant courage in the battle of Stony Point in 1779. On October 1,1779, de Fleury stood before the Continental Congress and received praise by the men who had penned the Declaration of Independence and who would later sign the Constitution. For his fearless actions, the Continental Congress ordered that a medal be struck in his honor. It is understood that the de Fleury Medal was the first Congressional Medal struck, if not the first medal authorized.

The Inland Electronic Navigational Chart (IENC) program has achieved a 5,000,000 download landmark since its beginning presence on Amazon's cloud site. The IENC program serves the IENC product and buoy data (figures delivered by the United States Coast Guard) as part of a Federal Geographic Data Committee(FGDC) pilot project, beginning in December of 2012. Since the conclusion of the project the IENC has transferred its cloud usage to a larger DoD contract, but remains to ser...ve its data to the nation’s waterway community.
“The milestone reminds us just how important this database is,” said Dr. Robert Mann, Project manager for the IENC program at the Army Geospatial Center. He also says that “Mariners use our data 24/7/365; it keeps them safe.” The IENC data allows end users to receive data updates via an RSS feed and in 3 different formats: Arcmap, WMS (Web Map Services), KML and soon GeoPDF.