Public Sector Remains Key Target Market

Many of the applications and services used by public authorities and institutions will be on display at INTERGEO in Karlsruhe (Germany) from 22th to 24th September 2009. The world trade fair for geodesy, geoinformation and land management is the autumn's largest industry event for the municipal IT sector. New and advanced technologies support more complex data capture and management, thus creating new application areas in the public sector.  

The theme 'Knowledge and action for planet Earth' shows that we need to be well informed to make viable decisions in politics, business and society. That's why advanced instruments, such as satellite-based Earth observation, are needed to obtain information, said Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Federal Minister of the Interior and patron of the 15th INTERGEO.

As well as advances in information acquisition, ongoing developments in the geoinformation sector have also led first and foremost to an improvement in data management and integration in ever new systems, thus offering the public sector a wide range of applications. Many administrative bodies are in contact with their customers or citizens via the Internet or are offering a whole range of Internet services. Many products and services are based on data and technologies exhibited at Intergeo, says Olaf Freier, CEO of Hinte GmbH and Project Manager of the trade fair.

The EU Inspire Directive makes it clear that it is now virtually impossible to imagine planning and development operations by administrative bodies without the support of geoinformation activities. According to Freier, the increased availability of geodata, particularly in the third dimension, is a key basic element in public administration.
He adds that trends and other opportunities are inevitable due to the development and ongoing introduction of Germany's geodata infrastructure (GDI-DE), which is linked directly to the INSPIRE Directive. In his view, the end of the line has not yet been reached in the expansion and even faster updating of databases when developing sensors for data acquisition. Data acquisition and continued development and presentation of data are far from losing their dynamism, particularly for the public sector.