Geospatial Caravan – Embracing One and All

This year’s Geospatial World Forum was held in Rotterdam during the first week of May. Traditionally, the General Board Meeting (GBM) of the European Umbrella Organization for Geographic Information (EUROGI) takes place during this international conference. As a member of the German Umbrella Organization for Geographic Information (DDGI), Benedikt Gräler (52°North General Manager and Head of Research) attended the GBM as DDGI’s European delegate. In addition to the regular business of a GBM, EUROGI also signed an MoU with EuroGeographics to cooperate in promoting the use of geospatial data [1]. Ben was also part of an EUROGI discussion panel on the topic of current advances in AI for geospatial application. The discussion focused on what future developments might look like, building on the capabilities of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT.

Friday midday, Ben had the opportunity to present our European project DIRECTED to the conference audience. The presentation introduced the Risk-Tandem framework and the first technical steps of our co-design approach.

The open source project GeoNode has become a core part of several projects at 52°North. As a result, it was inspiring to meet and discuss strategies with GeoSolutions, the core team behind GeoNode and GeoServer. Technical discourse is always interesting, but Ben also enjoyed catching up with colleagues in Rotterdam and discussing current and future collaborations.