Intergeo Brings Target Groups Together

The Intergeo 2011 event has shown that there are many new things in the pipeline. GIM International caught up with Olaf Freier, managing director of HINTE GmbH and Intergeo organiser, to find out his thoughts about this year's Intergeo, and also asked him about his vision on the future of Intergeo and the geomatics sector in general.

By Mark Pronk and Wim van Wegen

Freier is more than satisfied with Intergeo 2011. "The navigation conference has gone well, the presentations at the Intergeo conference have been very successful, and the new addition to Intergeo, Barcamp, has worked surprisingly well," he reflects. Conferences organised in parallel to the show, such as the navigation conference, are making Intergeo more dynamic and bringing different markets together.

The Barcamp event aimed to stimulate dialogue among the participants in a unique way. Rather than having a fixed programme, the participants were responsible for choosing which topics they wanted to see covered before the event started. The key topic this time was ‘Open Street Map'. "Barcamp was an additional opportunity to bring young professionals together to discuss geomatics-related topics in an open environment," Freier says.

Two years ago, the Intergeo Academy was introduced as a platform for bringing the geomatics industry into contact with other users of spatial solutions and data. Subjects from the often-complex geomatics world are explained to the audience in a more-accessible way in order to enable other industries to benefit from spatial information too. In this way, a larger audience is able to learn about and understand geomatics.

Olaf Freier expects to see an increasingly intelligent use of different kinds of products and services. New geomatics solutions are on the horizon, and some are already here: "The industry seems to be moving to provide more and more total solutions to end customers rather than focusing on individual components." Freier also envisages that such total solutions will bring with them a great deal of innovation, which will make it easier to serve those people using spatial information in the vertical market. Freier: "We need to gain a different understanding of ourselves and the industry."

When it comes to the future, Freier considers that we have to accept that Intergeo is gradually evolving into a horizontal event that serves the vertical market. Tools are being developed not only for colleagues at the trade show, but also for the vertical market. The navigation conference is one of the events that will contribute to this change. "Bringing target groups together is our major task for the future," Freier declares. "The thrust of Intergeo changes in line with demands from the market, and is completely different now compared to five or six years ago."

Intergeo 2011 welcomed over 16,000 visitors, which is more or less the same level as last year, and the same goes for exhibitor numbers. The number of international visitors, however, is up on the previous edition, and there has been a significant increase in the number of people travelling 300 kilometres or more to attend the event - which will be held in Hanover, Germany, next year. While the scientific part of Intergeo has been conducted mostly in German so far, Freier acknowledges that there is a growing demand for more activities in English, and he promises that the conference and other activities will gradually encompass more English-language components in the future.