Category: EARSC Activities

Overview

Geospatial World Forum is a collaborative and interactive platform, which demonstrates collective and shared vision of the global geospatial community. It is an annual gathering of geospatial professionals and leaders representing the entire geospatial ecosystem.

This comprises of public policies, national mapping agencies, private sector enterprises, multilateral and development organizations, scientific and academic institutions, and above all end users from government, businesses, and citizen services. With Geospatial Media and Communications as the primary driver, Geospatial World Forum is conceived, designed and managed by a partner network of about 50 organizations globally.

In January 2018, the platform celebrated its 10th anniversary in Hyderabad, India. Over the years, Geospatial World Forum has become the most talked about geospatial event, best-known for its futuristic themes, engaging content, and top-level attendees. Back to Europe after 2 years, Geospatial World Forum 2019 is committed to creating a premium platform for geospatial community to learn, share, connect, brand, and network with stakeholders associated with the industry.

Theme
#geospatialbydefault – Empowering billions!
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, driven by AI, Big Data, IoT, and Robotics, is bringing significant attention to geospatial technology and expanding its reach to larger masses of the society. Geospatial technology is now empowering IT-enabled services and optimizing engineering workflows and business processes.

Being an integral part of this disruptive journey, geospatial industry is now open to larger market drivers, creating new growth opportunities. The hidden treasure of spatial thinking is being unveiled through collaborative, interactive, and more user-friendly platform. Simplifying utility and value of geospatial knowledge for consumers became a determining factor for successful business models.

While disruption gets to be the new normal, geospatial is becoming ubiquitous, pervasive, and ‘default’ in our daily lives. Join the #geospatialbydefault movement at Geospatial World Forum 2019 as we strive to make geographic information a common language for 7 billion people around the world.

Register now! here

The event will take place from the 21-22 November, Brest, France.

See the programme

Register here:https://anaisturpault.typeform.com/to/de12RW

About IDEEO:

the IDEEO project is funded under the COSME Cluster Go International action. The consortium is coordinated by the EARSC and composed of 2 sectorial clusters Pôle Mer Bretagne Atlantique (France) and Cluster Lucano di Bioeconomia (Italy).

The overarching objective of the IDEEO project is the creation of a new European partnership which will promote internationally the use of European Earth Observation capability in different sectors such as marine, agriculture, energy etc.

If you are a cluster interested in IDEEO’s objective, please contact Rory Donnelly.

You can follow IDEEO on:

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The industry already plays a key role in the delivery of the Copernicus Services, but we consider that a great deal more is possible; the proposed programme lays out a number of key measures which can help. Industry has invested strongly in the development of new products and services, many based on the Free and Open data from Copernicus and is ready to invest further. We believe that a partnership between industry and government will enable the best returns for all parties. In this paper we set out our views on a number of the factors which can help deliver these increased benefits for Europe and its policy makers.

EARSC Position Paper

European Association of Remote Sensing Companies – EARSC:
EARSC represents the Earth Observation geo-information services sector in Europe with today 101 members (92 full members and 9 observers), coming from 23 countries covering the full EO services value chain including commercial operators of EO satellites, resellers of data, value-adding companies, geospatial information suppliers, consultancies and system/software providers. The sector plays a key role in providing value-added, geo-spatial information to its customers in Europe and the world. In 2016, the sector revenue in Europe was over €1.2b giving work to 7700 highly skilled employees; The sector is dominated by SME’s with over 95% of the companies having less than 50 and over 60% less than 10 persons employed.
This paper has been prepared and issued by the EARSC board of directors on behalf of the members of EARSC which are commercial companies, coming from Member States of the EU or ESA, providing services (including consultancy) or supplying equipment in the field of remote sensing or using EO data.

The survey is addressed at business or individuals who are (or have been) involved in commercialising a product or a service based on Copernicus Sentinel data.

Participants will benefit from a free 6-months trial EARSC membership, as well as a number of other benefits, including potentially being featured as a “success story” within the upcoming report (after follow-up interview)

The survey is comprised of 13 questions and should take less than 10 minutes to complete.

Take the survey

These sudies are in the frame of the study “Assessing the detailed economic benefits derived from Copernicus Earth Observation (EO) data within selected value chains”, under an assignment from the European Space Agency (ESA). website

EO4GEO – Towards an innovative strategy for skills development and capacity building in the space geo-information sector supporting Copernicus user uptake is an Erasmus+ Sector Skills Alliance that started January 2018.. EO4GEO aims to help bridging the skills gap in the Earth Observation / Geographic Information sector by creating a strong alliance of players from the sector/community. Its main objective is to reinforce the existing EO/GI training and education ecosystem and fostering the uptake and integration of space/geospatial data and services in end-user applications.

One of the first fields of the Project’s activity is the development and operationalization of a Body of Knowledge (BoK) for GI and EO. The existing Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge (GI S&T BoK), developed by the GI-N2K project on the basis of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, will be the basis for further development. We assume that describing the Geographic Information and Earth Observation domain should be done by defining the underpinning inter-related concepts (theories, methods, technologies, etc.) that should be covered in education and training curricula. The process of developing the BoK for GI and EO will be carried out by the network of experts covering both fields.

We would appreciate your support in the development of the BoK for GI and EO join the Network of GI/EO Experts. Therefore we invite you to fill the form available at the link http://bit.ly/openEO4GEOexpert.
All personal data of the involved experts will be processed in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). More information can be found in the form.

The candidate experts will be selected by the EO4GEO BoK for GI & EO Editorial Team based on the provided information and will receive upon selection another invitation, followed by the relevant materials and more precise guidance. EO4GEO has no dedicated budget for this type of work, but is currently developing a rewarding mechanism which will include, among others: acknowledgement and visibility of the contributing experts in the BoK and the EO4GEO platform; the joint preparation of scientific and other publications, etc. More information on how this would work and how you can benefit from it will be released together with guidelines for editing the BoK.

Thank you in advance for your readiness to support the elaboration of the Body of Knowledge (BoK) for GI and EO, which will be available for development of the curricula within the Erasmus+ Sector Skills Alliance and beyond.

More about EO4GEO Project: www.eo4geo.eu

As such, EARSC is deeply concerned about the potential impact upon the Copernicus programme should the United Kingdom cease to be a full participant and contributor to the programme. This brief statement sets out our views on the subject and articulates our desired outcome, which is to see the UK continue to contribute and participate fully in the programme.

The key arguments in support of this are as follows:

• Firstly, the UK government has invested significantly in Copernicus since the start of the programme, both via European Space Agency and European Commission programmes. This investment has benefited the programme substantially and has in part enabled its achievements to date. The Copernicus programme will benefit if this were to continue, as it will be able to exploit a larger financial envelope with the UK as a contributor.

• Secondly, the UK EO industry has contributed strongly with technical skills and capability since the start of the programme, making a significant contribution to its overall success. Copernicus would be able to achieve more with continued UK participation than without it, and the UK EO industry has the technical skills and industrial capacity to continue supporting the programme strongly.

• Thirdly, there are many successful pan-European partnerships and collaborations between EU and UK organisations in both the upstream and downstream elements of the Copernicus programme. Customers in the UK and the EU could lose access to specialist suppliers for both UK companies in the EU and EU companies in the UK. Partnerships developed in the business, in research and in scientific exploitation would suffer significant disruption and setbacks if the UK is no longer able to participate. UK research expertise in climate change has been extremely valuable to Copernicus.

In a recent UK government white paper , the UK indicates its interest to continue partnerships with the EU in space, including in particular the Copernicus programme. EARSC strongly supports this. There is precedent for this as Norway and Iceland have similarly negotiated participation to Copernicus despite being outside the EU. Financially, it should be attractive for the EU to maintain the UK financial and technical contributions, whilst the UK would continue to benefit from the data and information streams which Copernicus and its Sentinels generate, and from continued participation in Copernicus projects and contracts. We appreciate that relationships with the agencies, not all of which are under EU governance, entrusted with the responsibility to deliver Copernicus Services would need to be negotiated by the UK on a case by case basis.

EARSC would welcome the continued participation of the UK in the Copernicus programme following the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union, with the UK continuing to make a financial contribution to the programme and with UK industry continuing to be able to participate fully in EU-funded Copernicus projects and contracts. We would strongly encourage the UK Government and European Commission representatives to negotiate and reach agreement on such an arrangement as a high priority. Urgent clarification on the intended future arrangement would help to avoid disruption to current business arrangements.

Brussels, September 2018.

EARSC Statement on Brexit

European Association of Remote Sensing Companies – EARSC:

EARSC represents the Earth Observation geo-information services sector in Europe with today 101 members (92 full members and 9 observers), coming from 23 countries covering the full EO services value chain including commercial operators of EO satellites, resellers of data, value-adding companies, geospatial information suppliers, consultancies and system/software providers. The sector plays a key role in providing value-added, geo-spatial information to its customers in Europe and the world. In 2016, the sector revenue in Europe was over €1.2b giving work to 7700 highly skilled employees; The sector is dominated by SME’s with over 95% of the companies having less than 50 and over 60% less than 10 persons employed.
This paper has been prepared and issued by the EARSC board of directors on behalf of the members of EARSC which are commercial companies, coming from Member States of the EU or ESA, providing services (including consultancy) or supplying equipment in the field of remote sensing or using EO data.

The 2019 Forum will carry the theme ‘#geospatialbydefault – Empowering billions!’ to demonstrate geospatial technology as ubiquitous, pervasive, and ‘default’ in our daily lives. Some of the topics to be discussed, includes sustainable development goals, smart cities, geointelligence, location analytics & business intelligence, environment; and emerging technologies such as AI, IoT, big data, cloud, blockchain and others.

We encourage EARSC members to contribute your expertise and participate at the Forum. Call for speakers are open until 30 September 2018. More details are available at www.geospatialworldforum.org

Nominations for the award were collected from EARSC members who then vote and the winner has been selected by an international, independent jury of EO sector representatives.

Sinergise demonstrated successful development of EO services for a target market (sector or geographic), a strong contribution to a defining European programme (Copernicus and ESA projects) and has exhibited 54% revenue and 27% employment growth in the last year.

EARSC and a prestige jury have thereby recognised Sinergise as one of the company’s that has made the most significant contribution to the development of the Earth Observation sector in Europe.

Grega Milcinski, CEO of Sinergise, stated “We could not have been happier about how things are evolving. We have entered the space market two years ago by demonstrating a novel way to manage petabytes of EO data in the cloud and today Sentinel Hub users process almost two million requests every day. This award is an important external affirmation of our business case, which would not have been possible without superb Sentinel data and its free and open policy. We are looking eagerly into the future, with DIAS platforms and even more data! EARSC and its members have already proven to be a valuable support in our activities and we hope to continue great cooperation in coming years as well.”

About Sinergise:

Sinergise is a SME from Slovenia with extensive expertise in developing advanced geospatial information systems based on web technology. The team has successfully completed several country scale projects related to support in agriculture and land administration in Europe and Africa. In 2016 Sinergise established satellite imagery processing engine in the cloud, Sentinel Hub, which won Copernicus Masters award the same year. It now powers several tens of earth observation applications in Europe, Africa, US and Australia and at this moment processes two million requests every day, crunching more than quadrillion satellite imagery pixels from Sentinel, Landsat, MODIS and other missions.

In 12 years of operations Sinergise built solutions for large governmental clients in Europe (United Kingdom, France, Slovenia, Croatia, Turkey, Macedonia, Montenegro, Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, Moldova) and Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Mauritius), almost all of them still being supported nowadays. Altogether there are more than 2 million people annually using Sinergise’s tools and its technology helps to manage more than 50 million property records and more than 500 million EUR of transactions annually.