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Representatives from national geomatics and geoinformation networks met yesterday in the sidelines of ISRPS2008 to work out an international approach to overcoming technology challenges in the field.

At the time of writing, Byung-Guk Kim, co-chair and director of the Korean Land Spatialisation Group (KLSG), which convened the meeting as part of the Congress, anticipated that all nine groups represented at the workshop would sign a memorandum of understanding by the end of the day.

'This meeting is about the next level of collaboration – how we make these national spatial data networks talk to each other and build something on a worldwide scale,' said Nicholas Chrisman, co-chair of the workshop and scientific director at Geoide in Canada.

Geoide is a Canadian initiative devoted to data interoperability. 'Geomatics covers everything and anything related to geographic location. What brings us together today are the technological challenges confronting those in the field,' he said.

'There are new positioning technologies that allow us to handle mobility in time and space. There are challenges with models of environmental change. There are new technologies coming along in the distributed sensor world that are going to make our old ideas of centralised databases look foolish.

'Our groups are the technological innovators. We see this as a critical combination of technologies that are going to make a difference in decision-making and management of cities,' said Chrisman.

While some networks, including the Canadian, French, Dutch and Australian networks, have long-standing partnerships, the workshop has succeeded in reaching several new groups. Geoide’s collaboration with KLSG, for example, began around 18 months ago.

'We issued 13 invitations issued, and nine networks have come to the workshop. I didn’t know there were this many organisations in GIS and geomatics. I realise now that they are doing the same things we are doing in Korea,' said Kim.

'We’re finding new partners here. There’s a group from Iran that no-one had heard from before and there’s a guy from Finland here saying, ‘well, we’re wondering why we don’t have a group!’ Kim added.

ASM Newsletter is distributed by e-mail every two weeks. It reports on events in the spatial industry in Asia and events outside the region which will impact on Asia.