During URISA's 42nd Annual Conference in Reno last month, industry leader Don Cooke was the honored recipient of the prestigious Horwood Distinguished Service Award.

The Horwood Distinguished Service Award is an occasional award given for long-term service to URISA and the profession. This year it was awarded to Don Cooke. Donald Cooke was a member of the Census Bureau team that developed the Dual Independent Map Encoding (DIME) system in 1967. In 1968 he co-founded Urban Data Processing, Inc, now Harte-Hanks Data Technologies. HHDT is a leader in supplying MCIF services and software to banks. In 1980, Mr. Cooke founded Geographic Data Technology Inc, which now employs 550 people in its role as vendor of premium street and boundary databases for Business Geographics and LBS applications. GDT was the major TIGER digitizing contractor in the mid-1980s, and is a CRADA partner and data supplier to the Census Bureau.