ISPRS and UN-GGIM Launch National Mapping and Cadastre Agency Forum

The International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) together with United Nations Initiation on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) have announced the First ISPRS – UN-GGIM National Mapping and Cadastral Agency Forum. National Mapping and Cadastral Agencies (NMCAs), many of them organised in UN-GGIM, form a significant group of members of ISPRS, acting as the ISPRS Ordinary Member for many countries. NMCAs play an important role in their countries, providing geospatial data of various levels of detail, types, and scales, which form the basis of today's geospatial data infrastructure – an indispensable national asset for sustainable development of the country and many other applications.

Successful cooperation between ISPRS and the NMCAs on many levels, and since a number of years also with UN-GGIM, is a result of this connection. One of the strategic goals of ISPRS is to provide a better forum for NMCAs to discuss their scientific and technical issues in mapping with international colleagues, and thus to give them better visibility. As a result, ISPRS and UN-GGIM invite National Mapping and Cadastre Agencies worldwide to join the next ISPRS Congress, to be held in Prague in 2016, in the form of a two day meeting, to be known as the ISPRS - UN-GGIM National Mapping and Cadastral Agencies Forum. This Forum will be organised as an integral part of the Congress, and in parallel with the ISPRS-IAA Space Agency Forum.

The ISPRS Congress is the most important ISPRS meeting organised every four years. Each Congress is a meeting of several thousand scientists and professionals. The congresses attract participants from all over the world to discuss the latest in technical, scientific and application oriented development in remote sensing, photogrammetry and spatial information. ISPRS has thus created a platform for specialists from the different but interrelated areas of the geospatial field.

Topics

Potential topics to be discussed during the Forum are: consistent feature catalogues across scale; database updating; 3D databases; big data; mobile and smart technology; semantic and geometric data integration; geospatial data infrastructure; visualisation and communication of geodata; earth observation infrastructure (Landsat, Copernicus etc.); remote sensing and photogrammetry applications; crowd sourcing; web mapping and service oriented architectures; open data policy; decision-support systems; international cooperation and standardisation.

Questions

Sessions will comprise invited and presented papers. One session of the Forum will be a shared session of the National Mapping and Cadastre Agencies and Space Agencies. It will be dedicated to two questions:

- How do National Mapping and Cadastre Agencies use satellite remote sensing data, what they would like to see improved, etc.

- What are the plans of Space Agencies and Earth Observation Companies in the sphere of data for National Mapping and Cadastre Agencies; how to strengthen this cooperation?

The Forum provides an ideal platform for mutual discussions, as well as discussions with one of the main producers of space imagery and with the scientific community. It will be an integral part of the programme of the XXIII ISPRS Congress, and held on 14 and 15 July 2016.