REDWOOD CITY, Calif: Ingres Corporation, a provider in open source database management company, today announced that the company is actively supporting university and open source organization initiatives to promote students in open source.

Ingres is sponsoring a program between three universities in Canada and the United States to offer course credit to seven students that are participating in a semester long project working on Ingres Database.

Universities participating in the project are Michigan State University, The University of Toronto, and The University of the Virgin Islands, said a press release.

"Academic collaboration is one of the best ways to foster innovation," said Deb Woods, vice president of product management, Ingres.

"Ingres started off as an academic project and has come full circle, now giving back to academia. By supporting open source collaboration at the university level, we hope to help students gain a better understanding of the types of projects and challenges they will be facing after graduation. It also gives students a great head-start into the open source environment," he added.

Students are working with Ingres on a project to create an easy-to-use interface for managing Geospatial Data.

The project would focus on testing a Drupal plug-in for OpenLayers and fixing bugs using Ingres as the backend database, providing SQL standards and support for geospatial data types and functions, said the release.

"The geospatial project offers students the opportunity to work on real code that other people will use and gives the students a sense of pride outside of their schoolwork," said Greg Wilson, assistant professor of computer science, University of Toronto.

He further said that open source also gives the students access to a vast network of developers for assistance, so they come out of the program much better trained and with a sense of being part of the broader community of programmers.