Policy/Research Forum - Leveraging SMEs' strength for INSPIRE



Prof. Henk J. Scholten
CEO
GeoDan
The Netherlands




BIO
Henk J. Scholten studied Mathematics and Geography at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and obtained his Ph.D. on the subject of models for housing allocation at the Faculty of Geography of the University of Utrecht (NL) in 1988. Since 1990 he is professor in Spatial Informatics at the Faculty of Economics of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Director of the Spinlab (www.spinlab.vu.nl). Prof. Scholten is founder and CEO of Geodan, one of the largest European companies specialised in Geospatial Information Technology (www.geodan.nl). On Friday April 29th, 2005, Prof. Scholten received a Royal Decoration for his significant contribution to geo-information, both on a national and international level. In July 2009 Prof. Scholten has received the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ by Jack Dangermond, founder of ESRI. This award is given to a person who has contributed significantly to advancing the science and technology of GIS throughout his career.

ABSTRACT
INSPIRE and How Geodan has been Inspired, from Experiences to Expectations
Geodan has been involved in the INSPIRE directives from the earliest moment, when the first questionaires were sent out about what INSPIRE should fulfill. In the beginning we were sceptic about the progress and the adoption of the programme. However, in the past years we have been impressed by the progress, we are now a strong believer. In this presentation we will give an overview of the way we have developed our INSPIRE expertise, and how we moved from research of the possibilities, towards consultancy to clients, towards developers of solutions based on the INSPIRE directives, and we became a user of the INSPIRE data sources. INSPIRE brought us a competitive edge for our work, and now it brings the possibility to make use of the data to makes this world a little bit better place to live.

Giacomo Martirano
Technical Director
Epsilon Italia
Italy



BIO
Giacomo Martirano is an Electronic Engineer, born in 1964, since 1990 to 1997 in the On-Board Spacecraft Systems Division at Thales Alenia Space and since 1997 co-founder and Technical Manager of Epsilon Italia, an independent SME active in the Geomatics sector. On behalf of Epsilon Italia Giacomo was/is responsible for many international projects as well as for projects implementing geomatics solutions at local level for the Public Local Authorities. He is actively involved in many INSPIRE implementations, ranging from data harmonization to network service deployment and to validation and testing. Since 2012 he is also vice-chair of CEN/TC 287.

ABSTRACT
SEIS & INSPIRE in action
Epsilon Italia, a small enterprise specialized in geospatial technologies, is currently involved in the execution of a contract for the implementation at national level of SEIS (Shared Environmental Information System) for 5 themes: Air, Water, Soil, Noise and Radiation.
The main challenge was the design of the SEIS theme-specific geodatabasesneeded for an efficient data management, focusing on the national reporting obligations set by the Environmental European Agency and the INSPIRE obligations set by the Implementing Rules on the interoperability of spatial datasets.
The following main steps have been done in order to fulfill the contractual requirements:

  • a cross check between the source data schemas, the theme-specific reporting schemas and the relevant INSPIRE application schemas;
  • the creation of one single geodatabase for each SEIS theme, with a core structure INSPIRE compliant, extended in order to model the additional elements present in the other two schemas (source data + reporting);
  • the creation of matching tables as practical tools enabling the mapping of the elements of the three different schemas onto the geodatabases.

The work, still in progress, can be seen as a practical experience of how to implement SEIS using INSPIRE.

Rod Plummer
Managing Director
Shoothill
United Kingdom



BIO
Rod Plummer, MD at Shoothill, talks about what motivated Shoothill to develop FloodAlerts, how the system was designed, how it utilises the cloud and the possibilities of its use in other parts of the world.

ABSTRACT
In April 2012, following 20 months of consistently lower than average rainfall, the UK began, and continues to experience, the wettest period in its history, with many 1000’s of flood warnings being issued by the Environment Agency. FloodAlerts was launched 3 days before this rainfall began. It is the UK’s first live flood warning map, taking data sourced from the Environment Agency from over 1800 sensors around England and Wales and updating it every 15 minutes.  FloodAlerts allows someone to register a monitored location and, when a flood warning is issued for that location, the user receives a notification. Since launch, the system has won the Guardian Award for Innovation, featured on the BBC and received testimonials from some of the UK’s leading politicians and Ministers. FloodAlerts is deployed on smartphones, tablets, Facebook, news sites and on the Environment Agency website itself.   A commercial version of FloodAlerts is also available, allowing companies to track and monitor their assets and receive alerts during flooding instances.

Ken Harkin
Business Development Manager
Sparx Systems
Australia




Bio
Ken’s diverse career of three decades in IT has included sales, consulting and relationship development in the government and corporate sectors both local and international. Since 2006 he has been Business Development Manager with Sparx Systems working closely with global standards and industry groups, providing direct support to development teams, through Sparx Systems UML modelling and design tool, Enterprise Architect.  Ken, described as a positive change agent, thrives on the challenges and opportunities currently facing Geospatial, SmartGrid and e-Health. Through his commitment to education and training, he has on behalf of Sparx Systems, initiated excellence awards to promote these industries.

ABSTRACT
Opportunity, Challenge and SME Innovation

Legislation, standards and technology are driving industry change on a global scale.  As open standards enable unprecedented levels of data interoperability and information sharing, industries, formerly independent, are recognising mutual reliance. Standards and technology are positioning the geospatial sector in new industrial constellations, where the importance of place is recognised and where collaboration and innovation are accelerating the market, for location aware solutions. Many of the advances in mobile networks are the result of government making spectrum available to industry, similar advances in location based applications can be expected from government making data available, for example, INSPIRE. A collaborative approach to education and training is essential, to ensure that the evolving geospatial sector, has the workforce capacity, to apprehend market opportunities, as they present themselves.  This will require government, academia and the geospatial private sector, to co-operate in securing a sustainable share of a finite resource, - which continues to shrink, due to generation retirement - and which is also the target of Health, Smart Grid, Retail and Aviation.  smeSPIRE encapsulates this imperative, and Sparx Systems, an SME itself, supports the international geospatial community agenda.  We will review how we support the community in practice.

Richard Rombouts
Technical Sales Manager
Snowflake Software





ABSTRACT
Meeting the needs of SME data providers to achieve INSPIRE requirements Challenges
To meet various INSPIRE implementation requirements enterprise-level software solutions are often needed by organisations to deliver the required services and datasets. As the value of a total INSPIRE implementation tends to exceed European Commission financial thresholds, the tender has to be published under European public procurement rules. Often, this results in long and complicated tendering processes that can take up considerable time and can be a drain on the already limited resources of SMEs. Many end-users are under the impression that INSPIRE solutions can only be provided by large software vendors or system integrators as a single end-to-end solution. These solutions often consist of a combination of inter-dependable, coupled components that are difficult to replace individually. End-users are therefore forced into a proprietary solution with little room to manoeuvre or to replace and upgrade individual components to better meet their organisation’s needs.
Solutions
Both large and small data providers need proven, flexible, enterprise-level solutions to achieve their INSPIRE requirements, at a price point that removes the time consuming and costly barriers of going to tender. Large solution providers may dominate the market however, it is often the SME technology providers themselves who have the agility to diversify and provide powerful but affordable solutions.  This presentation will look at how SME solution provider Snowflake Software is removing the need for SME data providers to go through a complex and long purchasing process by providing affordable, flexible, enterprise-level desktop software and enabling end-users to get set-up and started quickly.

Nicola Ferre
Education Bachelor in Statistic
Diploma in Political Science
Diploma in GIS and Remote Sensing
Master in GIS



BIO
He is currently head of the GIS unit of IZSVe. He presently has over 15 years experience in creating, updating and planning GIS project, tracking geo-databases, and technical reports to support daily and ongoing project on surveillance, monitoring and emergency veterinary activities. He is also directly involved in several research programmes both Italian and European level. He has been involved in graduated teaching activities in some Italian universities where he has supervised undergraduate and master thesis. He is author or coauthor of over 40 publications including peer-reviewed manuscripts, proceeding of conferences and abstracts.

ABSTRACT
It is recognized that, among different European Union Member States, there is a wide variety of spatial data available in the context of veterinary community. Given that, different data layers integration has shown as difficult to obtain mainly because of differences in database structures, geographical details, and spatial distribution. These differences are mostly due to data acquisition procedures, as information gathering and analysis has not been planned with the same background in mind. In order to solve these difficulties, the following paper presents an animal holding conceptual data model built under the European INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) Directive. The presented model extends the Data Specification on Agricultural and aquaculture facilities, part of the INSPIRE Annex III, moving towards a geo-referenced animal holding data management. The proposed data model has been developed by an interdisciplinary group made up of specialists in the field of Ontology, Geomatics and Veterinary, with a particular contribution of a local INSPIRE expert SME, 3DGIS srl. The aim of the project has been achieving a generic, extendable and interoperable schema, in order to embrace all kind of animal holding characterization, from a bee hive to the big poultry farm and to allow any kind of veterinary organization data to adapt the model to the nature of their legacy data. The data model allows the representation of animal holding objects at different levels of detail with the intention of discern the fundamental different patterns, processes and properties of animal holding activities. An on the field verification of the an application schema has been performed following the directives given by the EU regulation 1089/2010. Specifically, a schema mapping between the proposed model and the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie legacy data has been developed in order to test the possible spatial query, quantitative analysis and exploratory data analysis in veterinary field.

Giuseppe Conti
Trilogis Srl, Rovereto (TN)
Italy




BIO
Giuseppe Conti is CTO at Trilogis – Italy, a SME specialising in geospatial technologies, where he is also in charge for management of international activities. In the past years he has worked as senior scientist and bid manager at Graphitech – Italy a private industrial research centre, where he has been involved in a number of international projects on geospatial technologies. He holds a PhD degree from the faculty of Engineering of the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK and master's degree in Building Engineering from the University of Palermo. During his past working experiences he has been working for engineering firms in Italy and UK.

ABSTRACT
A non-financial cost-benefit analysis of INSPIRE: Opportunities for SMEs within a fast changing business scenario
Several studies have tried calculate the Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR) or Return on Investment (RoI) of SDIs or of INSPIRE itself, a particularly challenging topic addressed by a recent workshop hosted by JRC. In general terms, the studies agree on the long-term profitability of INSPIRE, nonetheless, assessing the true extent of its benefits is extremely complex, due to the ecosystem of implications at EU, national and local level. INSPIRE is bringing several benefits to PAs and, in turn, to SMEs, with in technical, administrative and operational implications that cannot simply be measured in financial terms. Furthermore, the combined effect of initiatives such as INSPIRE, EIS/EIF and ISA, are causing a cultural change, characterised by increased awareness –among PAs- on the importance of interoperability and data sharing (also synergising with Open Data initiatives), potentially creating further business opportunities for SMEs.  It is clear that these benefits are extremely difficult to assess if considered only in economical terms, yet they will profoundly improve PAs and will create positive feedback mechanisms that will create further business opportunities, within INSPIRE and beyond.  Maximising awareness over such aspects is important for European SMEs to be able exploit these opportunities to the widest possible extent.

José Ángel Molero
International Manager Assistant
COTESA (Grupo Tecopy)
Spain




BIO
José ÁngelMolero González has a versatile profile which combines technique knowledge in geography, geospatial analysis and spatial planning with international business administration skills and experiences. As graduated in geography by the University of Leon (Spain), he has served as research assistant for the Department of Geography of the Trinity College University of Dublin (Ireland) and the Transport and Spatial Planning Institute of Erfurt (Germany). In recent years, he has acquired academic and professional experience in enterprise internationalization by coursing a Master in International Business Management and working as international trade consultant for the Trade Commission of the Embassy of Spain in São Paulo (Brazil). Currently he is International Manager Assistant of the Spanish company Grupo Tecopy, specialized in civil engineering, spatial planning and geospatial activities.

ABSTRACT
A non-financial cost-benefit analysis of INSPIRE: Opportunities for SMEs within a fast changing business scenario
LocalGIS is a very succeed free software developed by COTESA (Grupo Tecopy) for the Ministry of Industry of Spain launched in 2008. It can be defined as a land information system for local authorities (County and City Councils) which facilitates geo-referenced municipal management and offers advanced on-line information to citizens using municipality cartography. This software meets the needs of local authorities to have a mapping management tool which allows for quick and effective access to information at a low cost, thus increasing municipal efficiency both in terms of internal management as well as citizen services.It also allows citizens to access relevant municipal information via Internet. LocalGIS helps local bodies to meet the INSPIRE Directive, since it is a cross-platform system, open source, scalable and compliant with relevant international standards relating to the management of geographic information, such as the use of a database that supports Simple Features, a WMS compliant map server, a GML exchange format, metadata as per ISO 19115 or the European Directive INSPIRE. LocalGIS has generated associated business activities for SMEs related to consulting services, system installation, georeferenced information processing and loading, customized training, support and maintenance, custom development or integration with other applications. We considerer LocalGISas an innovating solution based on open source technologies and open data policies, which contributes to the dissemination and implementation of the European INSPIRE Directive, creates further opportunities for geospatial SMEs and gives a service to the citizenship for free. It is therefore a Spanish benchmark to take into account at European level.

Dr. Paolo Cavallini
Managing Director
Faunalia
Italy



BIO
With a background in animal spatial ecology, since 2000 increasingly focused its professional activity on free and open source GIS. He published many technical papers on GIS, and gave over 100 courses, workshops, and seminars on it. Through his company, Faunalia, he contributes actively to several mainstream GIS, including GRASS, PostGIS, and GDAL, and is member of Quantum GIS Steering Committee. Founded the GFOSS and ITPUG - ITalian PostgreSQL User Group communities in Italy, and participates to OSGeo.

ABSTRACT

SME in Between INSPIRE and Open Source
INSPIRE can be a technical and business opportunity for small and medium enterprises. However, this can be fully exploited only if initial barriers are sufficiently low. For this to happen: (1) software must be available; (2) specifications should be accessible, easy to understand, and open to user feedback. The solution to the first problem is free and open source software, widely adopted in SME. The second issue is still unresolved, and is hampering innovation. Faunalia experience in these two respects will be described, with suggestions on how to improve the situation.
Alejandro Guinea de Salas
Managing Director
Geograma
Spain




BIO
Degree in Surveying. Universidad del País Vasco. Masters in Geotechnologies Applied to Urban Planning and Architecture. Universidad de Salamanca. Co-Founder and Managing Director of Geograma. Spanish company founded in 1998, specializing in GeoInformation, GIS and Mobile Mapping. Member of Ex-board of Spanish Association of Geodetic Surveyors (COITT) Prior to Geograma, he worked in the City Council of Vitoria-Gasteiz as a surveyor, and in the Public Urban Planning entity of the same municipality as a GIS specialist.

ABSTRACT
INSPIRE Directive is changing the way of how the public administration is managing the Geographic Information. But it is a challenge for SMEs too. It is a must for all SMEs that are working with Geospatial Information and developing applications to take into account INSPIRE as a core in the main business lines. However, to adapt the companies and develop new business lines is quite difficult due the big change that it is necessary to make. From handling maps in CAD or GIS systems to manage XML files, standards, services, UML data and so on. There are new concepts that are appearing in the map industry. Not only the specific industry ones like OGC standards, but the most general ones like UML and XML too. But Inspire is not only about technology, it is about organization, coordination and laws as well, which are concepts not strongly established in map industry and SMEs. Until today, each government, at a national, regional or locallevel, has their own rules and workflows, so the ways to develop business with them were different and more heterogeneous.
Evelina Indilaite
GIS-Centras
Italy





BIO
Evelina Indilaite is a product engineer in a state enterprise „GIS-Centras“ of Lithuania. Academic achievements of Evelina have included both local and international studies’ experience. Her background in GIS field contains bachelor degree in geodesy and a master‘s degree in spatial information management gained in Austria. Evelina’s membership in Lithuanian Cartography Society brings her input into creating value of the cartography in Lithuania. Interest in a GIS field brought her to work on a geographic information portal of Lithuania (www.geoportal.lt). Analytical thinking, adaptability and high motivation help her to enhance the productivity, significance and maintenance of the geoportal.

ABSTRACT
The INSPIRE encouraged company to create a spatial information portal of Lithuania (geoportal.lt). SE National Centre of Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics “GIS-Centras” is the company where the most implementing activities of the INSPIRE directive while creating spatial portal – geoportal.lt happens. The company creates a truly national gateway for the spatial data access and distribution.

The national spatial information portal geoportal.lt allows to access and share information among the organizations in a World Wide Web. It helps to reduce time of search and access to the spatial data. It connects people, many organizations and business world. The INSPIRE implementation through the geoportal.lt lets for “GIS-Centras” to progress in terms of raising number of employees, gaining knowledge, new experiences and new business opportunities.

The INSPIRE contributed a lot to the innovative and necessary project for Lithuania - geoportal.lt. The reliable, up to date, unique, from the primary source and valuable spatial information are the criterion the geoportal.lt is following. The involvement of geoportal.lt in the vary business fields counts many success stories. Geoportal.lt creates the environment for the innovative, original and scientific ideas for the society. The number of the geoportal.lt users’ increases constantly and it confirms that the project is necessary for the people. Geoportal.lt is one of the success factors of the company “GIS-Centras”. Geoportal.lt recourses became networked and as a start point for the other projects. It brings a significant value for the country, for the different private companies and for the each citizen personally.
Paolo Viskanic
Managing Director and Founder
R3GISSrl
Italy





BIO
Paolo Viskanic is the managing director and co-founder of R3 GIS, a 10 year youngItalian SME developing WebGIS solutions for the public and private sector. He graduated in Tropical and subtropical Agriculture in 1991 at the University of Florence, making use of GIS for his thesis. He worked for more then 20 years in international GIS projects for United Nations, World Bank, European Union, private and public sector in Europe and Africa. His interest goes mainly to open source technology, e-government, open data and on the integration of GIS technologies in the management of all kinds of assets through interoperable and standardised services.

ABSTRACT
The importance of Spatial Data has been steadily increasing in the past decade. This trend is even clearer for small and medium organizations and enterprises. Whereas classic GIS was related mostly to Defense, Environment Protection and Government, Spatial Information is used on a regular base by a large number of actors of all sizes and sectors. The FreeGIS.net project, started as a Interreg Italy-Switzerland project by the Italian company R3 GIS, the technological Park of the Province of Bolzano (TIS), the Province of Bolzano (Italy) and the Kanton Graubünden in Switzerland. It’s aim was to devlop a platform based on best of breed open source software packages for creating INSPIRE compliant web services. A particular attention was given to multilingual aspects, since South Tyrol and Kanton Graubünden are both multilingual areas. A well defined and standardized setup lowers the investments needed to create INPIRE web services and brings INSPIRE to organizations, which would otherwise be excluded from the INSPIRE initiative, for financial or for technical reasons. Also, the ability to consume INSPIRE services in a standardized way and to easily merge them with own datasets using INSPIRE and OGC standards, will give SMEs access to geographic data all over Europe, lowering costs and difficulties related to obtaining data from different organizations. FreeGIS.net is an example on how a small enterprise can create business opportunities by investing on the deployment of INSPIRE-compliant technologies.
Luigi Zanella
Director Business Development
SINERGIS - Sede di Bologna
Italy




BIO
Luigi Zanella is Business development director at Sinergis, a DedaGroup ICT Network company. With a degree in Statistical and Economic sciences he has worked since 1989 in the design and implementation of enterprisewide Geographical Information Systems for the Italian public sector and utilities private company. In over 20 years dealing with all the main issues related to GIS in the local government and utilities he has gained experience in OGC and EU GI standard, large topographic databases management, urban planning, mobility and transportation, cadastral data, taxes and law enforcement, gas and electricity network management. He was involved in the design of large Italian GIS projects, such as the interoperabilty platform among Italian municipalities and cadastre agency and some of the major regional SDI in Italy.

ABSTRACT
partnerships and open data as enablers of (INSPIREd) innovative services
Keywords: cooperative knowledge, partnership, innovation, open data, inspire Private companies, independently from their size, composition and business model, need to increase and share their own knowledge and competences through collaborative networks and partnerships; at the same time, they need to work closely together with public sector to deliver innovative solutions. The geospatial sector is probably the best example, since geographical information may improve interoperability and exchange of information (and knowledge) between different domains. At EU level, both the ePSIplatform and the EU Open Data Portal provide a good picture of what can be considered the most powerful enabler to link information coming from different sources: geographic data From the point of view of a private GI company, the main drivers in Europe are now the governmental agendas on Infrastructure for Spatial Information (INSPIRE), together with the Public Sector Information and Open Data strategies. In 2012, Regione Emilia-Romagna defined a new project for opening the “opening” reference geodata as Linked Open Data (LOD). Sinergis and Planetek have had the opportunity to partner with Regione Emilia-Romagna to implement a solution to automatically generate plain OpenGeoData and Linked Open GeoData by wrapping existing Network Services (WFS) provided by the regional SDI (GetLOD project).
Giorgio Saio
Geographical Information Systems International Group
Italy





BIO
Giorgio Saio, graduated in Computer Science Engineering. Since 1992, Co-ordinator and legal representative of the GISIG Association (not profit SME organization), in particular in charge for the networking activities and the promotion of new initiatives. He is also in charge for the GISIG activities within the projects co-ordinated or participated as partner by the Association, within various European Programmes (e.g. ICT PSP, FP7, IST, EESD, GMES, Marie Curie, Leonardo da Vinci). As representative of the Association, he participates in various GI European and International Panels.

ABSTRACT
SME’s Perspective in Training for INSPIRE A number of European projects already achieved results for INSPIRE, exploiting them to produce eLearning training content to transfer the acquired knowledge and support improvement in GI skills. Training is indeed the way for inducing capacity building and that would be very important for SMEs operating in the context of spatial information, since they could play an important role in the INSPIRE implementation and to create innovation opportunities based on INSPIRE. Training perspectives for SMEs have a double impact:
- on one side to provide the necessary skill to turn into opportunities the new challenges in the spatial information fields and to play an important role in any INSPIRE compliant application
- on the other side training represents a new potential business activity for SMEs that can “forward” their acquired skills towards all the institution that need support to skill their staff in working with INSPIRE who need to be re-qualified as well to face the new competence required by INSPIRE

Other than presenting the SMEs training perspectives for INSPIRE, this paper presents the Training Framework designed as on-line tool with the availability of different modules related to various aspects of INSPIRE leading, throughout appropriated learning paths addressed to different professional profiles, to the acquisition of the necessary skills.
Simone Giannecchini
Founder
GeoSolutions
Italy



BIO
Simone Giannecchini (Ing.) is the founder and managing director of GeoSolutions. He is a Charter Member of OSGeo, the Open Source Geospatial foundation. He is also a member of the Steering committee for the GeoTools as well as the GeoServer Open Source projects. Before founding GeoSolutions he has worked as Software Engineer at the NATO Undersea Research Center, a Military R&D facility based in La Spezia (Italy), on the implementation of a client-server infrastructure capable of storing, managing and disseminating geospatial data (vector, gridded, imagery) leveraging on WCS, WFS and WMS Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Specifications.

ABSTRACT
Creating and Leading an SME Exclusively Based on Open Source Software: Vision or Illusion?
GeoSolutions was founded in 2006 around a simple and somewhat naive idea: leveraging exclusively on Open Source was a perfect business model for a SME to emerge and gain decent visibility in the geospatial arena. After 6 years of steady growth we want to take the occasion to look back to the road we covered so far to analyse how we got here, the errors we made as well as the decisions we took that proved to be correct. We will discuss common misconceptions about Open Source used to discredit its adoption but we will also discuss the common mistakes performed by entities approaching Open Source Software at first that may lead to failed adoptions. Lately the OpenData movement has been gaining momentum as a bottom-up process thanks to the high demand for transparency and participation arising from citizens. Alongside the INSPIRE directive has come into force resulting from a standardization process following the usual (which is not, per se, a synonym of successful) top-down approach. We will discuss and analyse the impact of these two new elements on the business model being presented trying to highlight opportunities and impediments for companies like GeoSolutions but also for the target clients.
Herman Assink
President
Idgis
The Netherlands




ABSTRACT
Implementing INSPIRE Services for Dutch Provinces
Data on protected sites is, in the case of Dutch provinces, composed of six different datasets, which are harvested, harmonized and transformed to one INSPIRE compliant dataset on protected sites. The 12*6 datasets are harvested from WFS services and put into the Central Data and Services environment (CDS) which are described by a central catalogue service (CSW). This catalogue service is queried on a daily basis to check if an update of a dataset is needed. Because of the high detail the data has been generalized using a custom technique to achieve excellent performance at every scale. The INSPIRE services are realized using the deegree open source OGC web services solution. Because of the streaming technology of deegree and the clever generalization of data the service can easily meet the INSPIRE Quality of Service requirements. INSPIRE services are installed and hosted by IDgis on (hired) servers which are located in large-scale data centers. Availability of services is monitored permanently. All used software is based on and available as open source.
Eduard Roccatello
CTO
3DGIS srl
Italy



BIO
Eduard Roccatello is the Chief Technical Officer and Founder of 3DGIS, an Italian GIS SME, active in 3D WebGIS development. He got his master degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Padua in 2008, presenting the first multiplatform OGC CityGML 3D visualisation tool capable to run in a web browser without any specific plugin. Among other things, he writes technical articles for an important italian Linux magazine since 2005 and he gives lectures of Web Engineering and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI).
Stephen Djaba
CEO
Geo-Tech
Ghana




ABSTRACT
The Geospatial Technology Trend in Ghana – The Geo-Tech Factor
Surveying and geospatial application solutions can never be done with in any country’s development without a proper work force to see its implementation. In modern urban town and country planning, monitoring of giant infrastructures, statistics and survey data collation, population distribution, chatting of the sea, extraction of mineral reserves are but a few areas in which survey and geospatial applications can be employed. Geo-Tech has worked effortlessly in all these fields to help the government expedites good governance to the people of Ghana. In recent times, we have contributed immensely to improve the addressing and naming of streets systems in Ghana with GIS application tools. In positional survey applications, we have contributed greatly to land acquisition distribution and property certification. Again, we have contributed greatly in provision of policies regarding surveying, geodetic reference network and GIS applications in Ghana. The main object of surveying is the gathering of data and the preparation of plans, maps and charts of a specific area with such data. From ancient times man had been interested indemarcating and recording property boundaries henceearly surveying efforts were directedtowards that direction. In contemporary times, modern life is made possible by the efforts ofsurveyors and the plans, maps and charts they helpto create. It should be noted that since surveying developed from ancient times, the science, methods and instruments of surveying have been greatly influenced by the level of technological development of any era. In this presentation we outlined how far Geo-Tech has worked in the past years in myriad areas in surveying and geospatial application solution to improve the standards of development in Ghana through Geographical Information Systems (GIS) application and positional surveying application in land management and urban planning. We have worked with state authorities to develop and keep standards as trend of surveying keeps on evolving with modern surveying equipments.
Massimo Zotti
Head of Government & Security SBU
Planetek Italia s.r.l.
Italy




BIO
Position in Planetek Italia: Head of Government & Security SBU. Education: Degree in Economics at the Università degli Studi di Bari. He specializes in GIS and Remote Sensing at Geography Department of the University of Nantes (France). He has produced several publications in the field of Geographic Information Systems publishing on the web. Languages: Italian (mother tongue); English (fluent); French (fluent).