Blog – President’s News 11/2020

Greetings from EUROGI,

This is the second of what will be my regular news items. They will be forwarded via the Blog on www.eurogi.org and our social media. As is usual in EUROGI, there is a lot going on, so in this news item I will touch on only three of our current activities in one of our Portfolio Groups. 

However, before I provide some information about them, I would like to remind that earlier this year we established seven Portfolio Groups, one of which was the Policy Portfolio Group.  This news item will focus only this Policy Group.  Some of my future news items will deal with the activities of the other Groups.

The Policy Portfolio Group has three what we call Focus Groups, as indicated below. Members can still join this Policy Group or one of its Focus Groups. Don’t hesitate, just send a request to secretariat@eurogi.org.

Women in GI

The main recent activity of this Group was to give a 75 minutes presentation during the Belgian BEGEO conference.  Three women of the Group members, Prof Monica Sebillo from Italy (the Group leader), Marian Murphy of Mallon Technology (Ireland) and Annelies Van Alphen from Geo Solutions (Belgium) took part in this event that I had the pleasure to moderate. The recording of the session will become accessible soon.

Beyond SDI

This Focus Group has 12 global level geospatial thought leaders and another 3 such leaders who do not directly participate in all activities but will keep a watching brief on the Group activities and make contributions to the evolving draft policy position paper.

The motivation for establishing this Group has been the need to identify a new geospatial paradigm beyond the SDI model with which we are now very familiar.  The new paradigm would take into account current and emerging technologies, market conditions, governance arrangements and other factors.

To date the Group has had two successful ‘getting to know each other’, and ‘finding our feet’ meetings.  In the near future, it will have a ‘deep dive’ session in order to explore in some detail key features of a new paradigm.

The ultimate near term aim is to produce a position paper which focusses on the envisaged new paradigm.

Harmonised Authoritative Geospatial Data

Although excellent work has been done over the past decade to produce harmonised authoritative data across the EU, there is still room for improvement.  This Group is currently working on a draft document which deals with background issues and which will provide clear suggestions regarding what needs to be achieved to improve the situation.

Enough for now.  I hope that you have found my comments regarding our three Policy Focus Groups interesting. If you would like to find out more about them, or about any of EUROGI’s other activities, please don’t hesitate to contact our Secretariat at secretariat@eurogi.org.

My next new item will be available soon. Don’t hesitate to react at the above mentioned address.

Until next time, all the best, and keep safe.

Hans Breemersch,
EUROGI President