Futuristic Intergeo 2016 Moving Full Speed Ahead

The geospatial community has gathered in Hamburg, Germany, this week for the annual highlight on the industry’s event calendar: Intergeo. This year’s edition is focused on the digitalisation of the geomatics industry, with Smart City and BIM featuring as key topics of the conference. The overall theme can be summarised as ‘How the geospatial sector can contribute to the society of the future’. The traditional Intergeo press conference, held halfway through the world’s leading trade show and conference for the sector, always provides a good indication of what’s going on at the event.

Times are a changing. At the press conference Christoph Hinte, head of the organising company Hinte, reminded the audience of the not-so-distant past when there were no such thing as smartphones, let alone apps. Now that countless apps put geodata at everyone’s fingertips, it’s sometimes hard to believe that that was only about ten years ago. In a world which will have 50 billion connected devices by 2020, there is certainly a great need to make efficient use of the mind-boggling amounts of data, and this is a key topic in Hamburg. By the way, it’s no coincidence that the venue for this year’s Intergeo is also Germany’s leading ‘smart city’.

Shaping the Future

Hans-Jörg Kutterer, president of the German Society for Geodesy, Geoinformation and Land Management (DVW), stated that the geospatial industry is now shaping the future, but the astonishing way in which digitalisation is transforming the sector is definitely also having a big influence on how that future is being shaped. The rapidly evolving developments in the industry are visible everywhere at Intergeo. Walking among the 531 stands at Intergeo, staffed by exhibitors from 35 different countries, is like gazing into a crystal ball – and one that really works. It is of course difficult to predict the exact future of the geospatial industry, but those who are in Hamburg this week certainly paint a plausible picture of how things are likely to look.

3D and UAVs

Other trends discussed at the press conference include live mapping – which is a logical result of a whole new approach in the mapping industry – and the transition from 2D to 3D. These two factors combined clearly show that these are exciting times for the geomatics industry, commented Jürgen Dold, president of Geosystems at Hexagon.

And what about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – are they still a hot topic at Intergeo? For sure, there are dozens of UAV companies present at this year’s event, but there are also some very interesting shifts in the unmanned aerial world. More on this here and here (and here).

Next year’s Intergeo will be held in Berlin. This year’s themes will certainly still be relevant then, and will be accompanied by e-government as the main topic. And one thing is for sure: the digitalisation of the geomatics industry will be the common thread running through Intergeo 2017 too.