President’s News 8/2022

Greetings from EUROGI,

As a following action to the last Blog, here is what happened during the past period.

Our first General Board Meeting 2022 was held on 10 May during the Geospatial World Forum (GWF) in Amsterdam, as Institutional Partner this time.

Our aim is always to meet with our Members and in the same time to offer them an opportunity to access an international event where they can get into contact and network with the geospatial community.

This year the theme of the GWF conference was “Geography and Humanity”. What else could be more up-to-date and touchy for the challenges that we face today in Europe ?

An opportunity to explore the possibilities, the aims, the compass of our actions that are deployed from it, the next goals, the side-tracking that we must get aware of in time, even derailing sometimes.

The outcome of this engagement was for EUROGI a positive impact towards dialogue with valuable new institutional partners and also towards subscription of new members.

We matured the “Beyond SDI” theme to the geospatial community and we launched our new “Digital Earth Alliance” initiative. Also we expressed vividly our views on the necessary implication of the Private Data Sector and the Open Data community, that was shortly after materialized on 24 May in an open invitation Webinar on the good practices of Open Data where three of our members (Geograma Spain, Geoforum Denmark and Esri Inc.) shared their expertise in this field.

During GWF, contacts were also initiated with the National GeoCadastre and the National Spatial Data Infrastructure of Ukraine. In the past months after GWF, these contacts were matured in some virtual meetings during which a more close cooperation was established.

Hereafter are more details about our GWF contributions:

“Digital Earth Alliance” was launched in our first part of our Thematic Session on 11 May. It is an alliance of higher educational institutions and departments, an umbrella brand across all relevant disciplines that will be established for increased visibility, recognition and uptake of geospatial education. The initiative was presented and created by Prof. Dr. Josef Strobl, leader of the “Education and Capacity Building EUROGI Portfolio Group and representant of “AGEO” Austria. EUROGI addressed the need for increasing student numbers in academic programs, and responded to questions and constructive positions from the audience.

Geospatial World Forum | 12 May 2022 | Photos by: Jeancarlo Nunes dos Anjos

During the second part of our Thematic Session, our Vice President Bruce Mc Cormack, presented the “Geospatial Green Deal” initiative, taken by the EUROGI Policy Portfolio Group. This initiative aims to produce a synergic white paper proposing recommendations on how Geospatial Information and Analytics can advance the European Union’s Green Deal Agenda. Experts, well-known in the industry, academia, and state governments, in dialogue with the DG Environment from the European Commission, developed the presented position paper based on their discussion during a series of online meetings. The goal of the session in Amsterdam was a hybrid interactive discussion with all interested participants, to prepare for next steps.

Alejandro Guinea de Salas, Executive Committee Member of EUROGI and Leader of the Communications Portfolio Group, representing EUROGI private sector, participated actively on two discussions: a roundtable by Invitation on “Open Data” and another round table organised by UNGGIM on the “Public – Private Partnership” on 12 May. His focus was promoting the essential need for easy access to private Open Data for the European Data Portal, so that this one could also harvest Open Data from private sources and not just from public data portals.

On 12 May, our Vice President, Bruce Mc Cormack, participated also under the section of National Mapping and gave a presentation, mentioning the “Beyond SDI” initiative which EUROGI has coordinated over the past year, an initiative that involved geospatial experts from around the world. Bruce ended by outlining and launching the idea that the possible framework which is in course of continuing the “SDI” Concept, could be actually the “Digital Twin” Infrastructure.