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Joining EARSC is a very efficient way of knowing the status of our industry, getting answers, and being active at defending the development of our business.

EARSC represents the European providers of geo-information services creating a network between industry, decision-makers and users. We consider that the market is at a crucial stage of development as Earth observation becomes more frequently used by society and adds positive value to our daily lives. Nevertheless, there are many issues, opportunities and threats facing industrial actors and, through a small secretariat, EARSC informs and involves its members though its website and newsletters, through the provision of web-tools, as well as organizing events.

Members tell us that they appreciate the opportunity to network with other similar companies and that this helps them develop new business opportunities as well as exchanging on best practices. They also like the regular flow of information as well as the knowledge that EARSC is able to influence EU and ESA policy when it is important for the sector

Industry stakeholders together could transform activities into meaningful action on behalf of our sector. Your membership is more important to us than anything else. Our strength is in our unity and together we can bring about positive change for the EO service community.

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(October 10-14, 2016, Laxenburg, Austria). The ConnectinGEO workshop on gap analysis and prioritization and the ENEON workshop will take place in the week of October 10, 2016 in Laxenburg, Austria. These workshops are co-located with a ConnectinGEO project meeting.

The workshops will address key issues associated with the societal benefits of Earth observations and the exploitation of Earth observation for societal policy and decision making.

SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES OF THE GAP ANALYSIS WORKSHOP

Providing Earth Observation Support to the Monitoring and Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals: Gaps and Priorities: Solving complex societal issues increasingly depends on information and knowledge derived from Earth observations and in Europe a rich landscape of Earth observation networks and actors aims to collect and process the necessary observations to satisfy these information and knowledge needs. Nevertheless, there are many gaps and the goal is to identify and assess these gaps in support of decisions on which gaps to address with high priority.

The Gap Analysis workshop will discuss the outcomes of the gap analysis and prioritization performed in the ConnectinGEO project. This gap analysis was guided by the information and knowledge needs resulting from humanity’s “Road to Dignity” detailed in the Agenda 2030 and specified in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed upon by the United Nations. Both the monitoring and implementation of actions to achieve these goals require extensive support from Earth observation and science communities. Several directives and crosscuting issues in Europe provided further guidance for the gap analysis.

The workshop will provide a forum to review the methodology for gap analysis and prioritization, discuss the relevant gaps and priorities in the European Earth observation networks and develop a strategy to address those gaps that have a high priority assigned.

The objectives of the gap analysis and prioritization workshop are to:

  • Assess the ConnectinGEO methodology for gap analysis and prioritization;
  • Review the list of gaps identified and the prioritization achieved;
  • Produce a final list of gaps with high priority;
  • Discuss a strategy to address these gaps and provide recommendations for the European Network of Earth Observation Networks (ENEON) and the European Commission concerning high-priority gaps.

OctoberEOGaps_WS

SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES OF THE ENEON WORKSHOP

Building a collaborative ENEON to inform policies and actions to address complex societal issues: Many in situ networks in Europe collect valuable Earth observations, and European institutions are involved in numerous global networks. A lack of cross-domain collaboration and coordination the interaction between Earth observation communities and policy and decision makers hinders a full exploitation of the integrated observations for societal applications. ENEON aims to develop coordination and collaboration between networks, the processing, and the generation and dissemination of products to better serve the growing societal needs for environmental intelligence.

ConnectinGEO is engaged in exploring the benefits and options of constituting a European Network of Earth Observation Networks (ENEON) that encompasses current networks in Europe in a single entity. The ENEON is designed as a forum for discussing gaps in the Earth observation networks and proposing concrete solutions to the European Commission in terms of completeness but also for ensuring continuity of critical infrastructures both in-situ and space based. It also serves as a coordination point for the European contribution to GEOSS with a focus on in-situ networks and encouraging the alignment of a transversal set of Essential Variables that is currently advocated by GEO.

The Objectives of the ENEON workshop are to:

  • Bring together the main current Earth Observation networks in Europe, including those that are umbrella initiatives;
  • Continue the development of an ENEON strategy from organizational and subject points of view;
  • Assess the extent to which ENEON is embedded in the European Earth observation landscape;
  • Discuss the status of work in the ENEON components and the work for the next year;
  • Explore options for ENEON contributions to the GEO Work Programme.

OctoberENEON_WS

Source

AARSE, the African Association of Remote Sensing of the Environment in cooperation with EARSC published an inventory of the African private EO and Geospatial industry. We wish to thank the European Commission and Spacetec Partners for their support to this work.

General inventories of organisations involved in remote sensing applications are available for some countries in sub-Saharan Africa. A survey targeting the African private sector involved in EO and geospatial sciences specifically, however, was never done before. This study is the first of its kind on the continent and a beginning to understand how companies in Africa operate, capture their expertise and assess their state and health.

AARSE and EARSC have analysed the data of the survey. It was conducted between February and April 2016.

The executive summary and the final report can be found at EARSC website

The results of the study will be presented at the AARSE2016 Conference on 25 October 2016 during the plenary session focused on Private sector in EO and GI.

More information at EARSC secretariat

Summary report and reference materials from the Copernicus Value Chain workshop, 26-27 April 2016, are now available online and EARSC contributions


EARSC at Copernicus Value Chain Workshop

  • You will find bellow links to EARSC representatives’ presentations delivered during the two-day workshop at the following link
  • In addition, our Secretary General, Geoff Sawyer has written a blog on his perception of the workshop that you may find at this link.

Interviews from the workshop ©EC

The main focus of the Copernicus Value Chain Workshop was to develop a clearer view of the Copernicus ecosystem so as to properly identify the barriers to entry and key enablers for market uptake. The meeting gathered a mix of representatives from the Copernicus ecosystem, actors from the ICT industry and potential end users.

IT and EO players discussed the improvement of the Copernicus data access and EU institutions acknowledge the role of the private sector in this respect. The market uptake will not happen without private sector involvement and the need for complementarity and clear boundaries between public and industrial initiatives has been reasserted.

An interview with Andreas Veispak, Head of Unit – Space Data for Societal Challenges and Growth at the European Commission filmed during the Workshop is avilable below

Thibaud Delourme, Policy Officer at DG Grow explaining the context of the workshop and the challenges the Space Data for Societal Challenges and Growth Unit is confronted to.

Chetan Pradhan, CGI, EARSC Vice chairman exposing the industrial perspective.

Download the workshop report

In the context of ESA’s “EO-Innovation Europe” vision, which has been shared with EARSC and which aligns very well with EARSC EO Marketplace initiative, we have elaborated the following concept paper

In order to ensure that maximum benefit is derived for the whole community (public and private, institutional and industrial) from the many investments being made, it would be a significant advantage if the suite of software tools and components developed for geospatial data exploitation were to be made freely and openly available as open source (OS) for others to download and reuse, and for them to add their own enhancements and publish these back to the community.

Such an approach is elaborated at the following position paper.
With this concept paper, we seek to sound out all stakeholders, covering both the scientific/institutional sector and industrial/private sector (including EARSC members and non- members) to determine whether there is interest in EARSC establishing and managing such an open source repository on behalf of the whole community, making it accessible to all stakeholders in a free and open way.

EARSC Open Source Concept Paper 01Jun2016.pdf

Comments, views and feedback would be warmly welcomed by email to secretariat@earsc.org

Read about our activities over the last few months and understand what the Association is doing.

This page gathers EARSC ‘ Annual reports. These describe how we fulfil our mission to foster the development of the European geo-information service industry. The report showcases the year’s accomplishments, detailing our key goals and activities, list of our members, and financial statement.

Reports

For the first year, under the umbrella of the EU Framework Program for Research and Innovation ConnectinGEO project, the EARSC competition “European EO product of the year” rewarded a company which has developed the most innovative product integrating an element of open data.

During the whole process about 16 companies got interested in the award and the finalists were: AnsuR Technologies (NO): GEO-ASIGN: the solutions for communication of operational EO data, Jeobrowser (FR): Rocket: the Earth in your pocket, Noveltis (FR): TIPS- Tidal Prediction Services: current and water elevation now only a click away and Planetek Italia (IT): Rheticus displacement: monitoring of terrain surface movements.

EARSC thereby recognised “Rocket: The Earth in your pocket” by Jeobrowser as the product which has best followed the jury criteria:
- commercial product integrating an element of open data resources
- type of innovation of the product
- challenge: problem to be solved and solution this product will solve
- expected impact and clients to address

Rocket: The Earth in your pocket The rocket application provides a unique entry point to search, visualize and download Earth Observation products from various catalogs. collections are available : for search : Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Landsat 8, SPOT 6-7 and Pleiades images for download : Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 data. The database is updated daily from the CNES PEPS platform (Sentinels) and from the USGS platform (Landsat). One of the coolest feature is the density result map. Basically, each result of a search request is represented as a density layer : the red part indicates a high density of results and the blue part a low density of results.

EARSC represents the Earth Observation geo-information services companies in Europe. Today EARSC has 80 members coming from more than 22 countries in Europe. Our members include both commercial operators of EO satellites, IT, downstream and value-adding companies. The sector plays a key role in providing value-added geo-spatial information to its customers in Europe and the world. In 2014, the revenue of the European EO services sector is estimated to be around €900m for approximatively 450 companies and giving work to over 6500 highly skilled employees.

Press release at EARSC website

Deimos Imaging has been presented with the EARSC Company Achievement Award during the occasion of the pre General Assembly cocktail, held on 21st June in Brussels. We want to thank GAF AG, Planet Germany GmbH and Spacetecpartners for their sponsorship.

left to right: Markus Probeck (GAF AG, Winner 2015 EARSC achievement Award), Fabrizio Pirondini (CEO Deimos Imaging), Sebastian Carl (GAF AG, Winner 2015 EARSC achievement Award), Massimiliano Vitale (Planet Germany) and Geoff Sawyer (EARSC Secretary General)

EARSC has thereby recognised Deimos Imaging as the company to have made the most significant contribution to the development of the Earth Observation sector in Europe.

The criteria used for the selection of the winning company were:
- the successful development of EO services for a target market (sector or geographic)
- a strong contribution to a defining European programme (eg. Copernicus, Inspire, ESA GSE
projects, etc)
- exhibited good revenue and/or employment growth.

Deimos Imaging, a subsidiary of UrtheCast Corp. (Canada), is a private Spanish company headquartered in Tres Cantos (Madrid) and with satellite control and processing facilities in Boecillo (Valladolid) and Puertollano (Ciudad Real). Deimos Imaging, one of the world leading satellite imagery provider, owns and operates the DEIMOS-1 and DEIMOS-2 satellites with a 24/7 commercial service from our three facilities in Spain and through our own network of ground stations in Canada, Sweden and Norway. All the ground segment software, from mission planning to image processing, has been co-developed in-house, allowing a unique capacity to customise the service to best suite all customer needs. Deimos Imaging provides high-quality services to clients worldwide, including imagery from our own constellation of satellites and from the satellites of our partners like the PanGeo Alliance, and value-added applications in a wide range of fields.

EARSC represents the Earth Observation geo-information services companies in Europe. Today EARSC has 80 members coming from more than 22 countries in Europe. Our members include both commercial operators of EO satellites, IT, downstream and valueadding companies. The sector plays a key role in providing value-added geo-spatial information to its customers in Europe and the world. In 2014, the revenue of the European EO services sector is estimated to be around €900m for approximatively 450 companies and giving work to over 6500 highly skilled employees.

Find the press release at

On June 22, 2016 EARSC members elected their new chaiman and vice-chairman at the occasion of the general assembly of the association.

On the picture: Celestino Gomez EARSC treasurer, Chetan Pradhan, EARSC Chairman and Geoff Sawyer, Secretary General, at EARSC AGM 2016

The AGM appointed Chetan Pradhan as Chairman of the association and Giovanni Sylos Labini as Vice-Chairman. André Jadot (Eurosense) and Massimo Comparini (e-geos) have been elected as new members of the Board.

Actual Board

Position Name Company
Chairman Chetan Pradhan CGI
Vice-Chairman Giovanni Sylos Labini Planetek
Treasurer Celestino Gomez GMV
Director Han Wensink OceanSpaceConsult
Director Christian Hoffmann Geoville Group
Director Nöel Parmentier Rhea Group
Director Massimiliano Vitale Planet Germany
Director Kamen Iliev TAKT IKI OOD
Director Vark Helfritz Airbus Defense and Space
Director Markus Probeck GAF AG
Director Andre Jadot Eurosense Belgium
Director Massimo Comparini e-geos