its4land researcher, Malumbo Chaka Chipofya, from the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Muenster successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on 15th July 2016. Malumbo’s dissertation, titled “Sketch-to-metric map alignment by qualitative spatial constraint matching”, addresses computational challenges of automatically grounding objects depicted in sketch maps within a base map. The work tackles two aspects of the problem: first it develops an approach for building robust qualitative representations of linear spatial features; then it presents heuristic methods for searching a qualitative representation of the base map for a copy of the qualitative representation of the sketch map. For his contributions to the various scientific areas encompassing the topic of his dissertation, Malumbo was awarded the grade of summa cum laude (with highest honors). Malumbo’s work will be an important part of the “smart sketch-maps” solution being developed in the its4land project.